Attend Me: Attention and Animation in Early Modern Drama

Abstract

What does it mean to pay attention and what is the cost? This dissertation explores these questions in the context of a historical shift in the value and purpose of the act of attending. In the late sixteenth century attention which was understood as the foundation of devotional practice, was widely recognized as the most important currency of the commercial and court theaters. Playwrights throughout the beginning of the seventeenth century began to experiment with attention as a form of creative labor and means of animating, transforming, or subjugating bodies in performance. I trace these moments of transformative attention in the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Richard Brome and others to examine how a new form attention in performance redrew the boundaries of an increasingly secularized and commodified self. I engage a wide array of primary sources including popular news pamphlets, recipe books, political treatises, and travel narratives that theorize and debate the biopolitics of attention. In our own moment, attention is critical to the latest stage of surveillance capitalism. Corporations monetize and governmental entities monitor what we attend to as they pay close attention to us. Rather than a recent development, I assert that the stakes of and competition for attention, and concomitantly the price of distraction, gained traction on the early modern stage.