Rethinking early modern playgoing, pleasure, and judgement

This chapter reconsiders the relationship between pleasure and judgement in the early modern playhouse. Whilst the significance of both pleasure and judgement to early modern playgoing is long established, critical studies have often followed the lead of a few particular playwrights’ most irritable paratextual pronouncements, in which rather extreme versions of judgement and of pleasure are explicitly framed as opposites: the censure of the wisest and highest of status is contrasted with an unthinking and unlearned pleasure that is itself defined as a lack of discernment.