Shakespeare and Fun: The Birth of Entertainment Value

In this decisively innovative approach to Shakespeare’s plays through their competitive relation to other choices from London’s vast entertainment industry, Donald Hedrick recovers a coherent internal dynamic of theatre’s ‘pleasure enclosure’ accompanying the revolutionary logic of capital’s new cultural and economic ‘extremes’.

Applying these relations to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and The Taming of the Shrew, he draws from cultural studies, contemporary and personal parallels, and wide-ranging historical materials: the semantic shift in keywords of pleasure anticipating the term ‘fun’, the practice of betting on actors, the psychology of the change of paying admission before an entertainment, and ‘reality shows’ of improvised contests of prose and verse. Continual insights emerge, both broad and specific: from ten ‘entertainment value axioms’ to Shakespeare’s awareness of entertainment value’s ‘birth’ at moments in his late plays, marking the end of a career that explored the value crisis of ‘too much fun’.