Comparatively little is known about Shakespeare's first audiences. This study argues that the Elizabethan audience is an essential part of Shakespeare as a site of cultural meaning, and that the way criticism thinks of early modern theatregoers is directly related to the way it thinks of, and uses, the Bard himself.

Bettina Boecker is Senior Lecturer at the University of Munich, Germany. She is also executive officer and research librarian at the Munich Shakespeare Library. She has published on a variety of early modern topics, but is particularly interested in the popular culture of the period and Shakespeare's afterlives.

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Criticism 2. 'No man of genius ever wrote for the mob': Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience and Romantic Shakespeare Criticism 3. Enter the Groundlings 4. Childish and Primitive: Shakespeare's Elizabethan 5. The Rediscovery of the Judicious Few 6. Neo-Elizabethanism 7. Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Appendix: The Grocer's Wife Bibliography Index