Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage

Pavneet Aulakh is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University. Primarily positioned at the intersection of seventeenth-century imaginative literature and natural philosophy, he is currently working on his monograph Digesting Bacon in Seventeenth-Century England. James Kearney is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Shakespearean Ethics in Extremity: Phenomenology, Theater, Experience (2025) and The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (2010), which won CCL’s Book of the Year Award. With Julia Reinhard Lupton and Lowell Gallagher, he co-edited Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Performance, and Philosophy (2020).

This collection of essays provides us with a series of fresh and illuminating entry points into the relationship between experience and experiment in the early modern world, and proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the theatre is one of the most illuminating entry points of all. Highly recommended.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsSeries Editors’ PrefaceIntroduction: Experimenting with Experience: Virtual Knowledge on the Early Modern English StagePavneet Aulakh, James Kearney and Adam RzepkaPart I. Experiential Knowledge1. Experiencing Shakespeare’s ExperiencesBruce R. Smith 2. Sad Experience: Jaques, Polonius, GloucesterAdam Rzepka Part II. Experimental Forms and Frames3. Theatre as Portal: A Shakespearean Thought ExperimentWendy Beth Hyman4. Fictional Hypothesis, Lived Experience and Re-worlding in The Tempest Jane Degenhardt5. Amazement in The TempestJenny C. MannPart III. Embodied Knowledge6. Knowing Instincts in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Katherine Walker 7. Laughing Matters: Violence, Witness and Experiential Knowledge in The Massacre at ParisKatie AdkisonPart IV. Experiential and Experimental Philosophy8. Theatrical Experiments and Experiential Protestants: Shakespearean Iconoclasm in Love’s Labors LostJennifer Waldron9. ‘Boys that play with watry Bubbles’: Innocence and Experience at the Infancy of ScienceElizabeth L. Swann10. Through 'the woods of experience’: Minding the Gaps in the Time of ExperimentPavneet AulakhAfterwordJulia Reinhard LuptonNotes on ContributorsBibliographyIndex