Listening for Form at the Cockpit Theatre

This chapter focuses on the repertoire of a single West End playhouse, the Cockpit, during the final decade of the early modern theatre’s existence. In this somewhat seedy rival to the more fashionable Blackfriars, new revenge tragedies and city comedies continued to be written and performed, but the two forms were becoming increasingly hybridized, their sonic and auditory investments less distinct. A set of supra-generic conventions, each deeply attentive to sound and space, began to emerge across the plays performed within this playhouse; collectively, these helped to a shape a kind of Cockpit brand. Combining a survey of the Cockpit’s 1630s repertoire with focused attention to two representatively hybrid plays (James Shirley’s revenge-comedy The Ball and John Ford’s urban tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore ), the chapter asks how this playhouse’s scrutiny of formal and sonic contests participated in the development of early modern theatre as a cultural institution.

Active listening · Aeronautics · Art · Cockpit · Visual arts · Communication · Computer Science · Engineering · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Philippine History and Culture · Psychology · Theater, Performance, and Music History