Early modern playing companies performed up to six different plays a week and mounted new plays frequently. This book seeks to answer a seemingly simple question: how did they do it? Drawing upon work in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, it proposes that the cognitive work of theatre is distributed across body, brain, and world.

Introduction The Stuff of Memory Action and Accent: Voice, Gesture, Body, and Mind Social Cognition: Enskillment in the Early Modern Theatre Conclusion: Towards a Model of Cognitive Ecology

EVELYN TRIBBLE Professor of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is the author of Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age (with Anne Trubek) and Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England.