Niko Suominen’s doctoral dissertation, Early Modern Performance and the Rhetoric of Theatre: The English Renaissance Stage as Metatheatrical Rostra in Public Debate, will be publicly examined at Tampere University’s Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences on Friday, 7 November 2025 at 12, in Main Building, Lecture Hall D11.
The custos will be Professor Esa Kirkkopelto from Tampere University, and the opponent will be Professor Emeritus John Drakakis from the University of Stirling, United Kingdom.
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Early Modern Performance and the Rhetoric of Theatre: The English Renaissance Stage as Metatheatrical Rostra in Public Debate
ABSTRACT
This dissertation cross-examines non-theatrical and theatrical forms of early modern performance which operated and interacted with and within the public and private spheres of the English Renaissance culture. It genealogizes the models of agency for the early modern poet-playwrights who wrote in a historical reality where political and moral were inseparable dimensions. After exploring these underlying mechanics of performance and agency in the world of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this dissertation approaches the London of the playhouse period (1567-1642) as a semio-memetic nexus for rhetorical agon. The contextualized close readings in this dissertation demonstrate how the poet-playwrights manipulated the public consciousness of their audiences by recycling familiar elements in their inter-referential plays. The culmination of this dissertation is a case study of three inter-referential Jew plays, in which the recycling of similar elements acts as philosophical and personal debate between three poet-playwrights. The stage Jews in these plays function as a rhetorical device in the public debate which takes place in the dialogic platform provided by the London playhouses.
The primary method of this dissertation, which consists of four different thematically interlinked parts, is contextualized close reading of literary and non-literary texts.
While the agency of Shakespeare’s contemporary theatre practitioners did not manifest in action the same way as our modern political theatre, both non-theatrical and theatrical forms of early modern performance provided a semi-autonomous sounding board in a hierarchical world that existed before the individual rights and the advent of mass media. This dissertation proposes that the early modern entertainment industry was not simply a precursor to our contemporary notion of consumer culture, but instead it would be more proper to speak of early modern participatory culture. The capital of England housed theatrical performances for over seventy years, and this continuous and centered theatre practice transformed London into a living memory machine. Where the Renaissance pedagogy had instilled the poet-playwrights with rhetorical mindset and persuasive eloquence, the interactive forum of playhouses and printing press offered them personal rostra for communicating their ideas in dramatic form. The culminating case study of this dissertation sheds therefore a new light on Shakespeare’s public stance on protocapitalism, immigration, and religion in the 1590s.