This Element attends to attention drawn away. That the Globe is a 'distracted' space is a sentiment common to both Hamlet's original audience and attendees at the reconstructed theatre on London's Bankside. But what role does distraction play in this modern performance space? What do attitudes to 'distraction' reveal about how this theatre space asks and invites us to pay attention? Drawing on scholarly research, artist experience, and audience behaviour, This Distracted Globe considers the disruptive, affective, phenomenological, and generative potential of distraction in contemporary performance at the Globe.

Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary, and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality, and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender, and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne, and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.

There is scarcely an element of Hamlet that has not received attention many times, yet both general reader and sophisticated critic would generally agree that the character of Hamlet and the full meanings of the play remain mysteries. No less a puzzle is the art of Hamlet, for, while the form of the art is elusive, the feeling of essential meaning is strong. Professor Aldus hopes to enlarge our understanding of Hamlet and our appreciation of Shakespeare as a conscious artist of great subtlety by studying the play’s dramatic structure in the light of Aristotle’s Poetics and its meaning as literary myth in the light of Plato’s Phaedrus. This is a study of Hamlet as literary myth, a figurative mode of art in which structure is basic; yet primal myth, myth in the larger, non-literary sense, becomes part of it too, because the substance of Hamlet seems to be of this kind. Professor Aldus’s reading of Hamlet is both radically new and decidedly provocative. A great deal of very careful inquiry has gone into the unearthing of connections which at first sight often seem improbable and tenuous, but which, one comes to find, have an illuminating total unity. Future commentators may not accept all that Professor Aldus has to say about, for example, Ophelia’s crown of flowers, but they will hardly be able to ignore it.

This book demonstrates how contemporary theories of subjectivity have their roots in early modern philosophical and literary arguments, particularly in Shakespeare's "distracted Globe." Abdulhamit Arvas discusses Shakespeare's Hamlet in relation to the modernist idea of the autonomous self and the postmodernist idea of the decentered subjectivities to explore the notion of the self in early modern thought and to suggest how Hamlet's preoccupation with philosophical and rhetorical modes of self-display can be seen as anticipating certain postmodern theories. This work offers an interpretation for Hamlet's subjectivity from a postmodernist point of view which asserts that the play examines the very discursive formulation of the self and uncovers the fragility of the idea itself. In conjunction with these arguments, the book includes a close analysis of Hamlet's postmodern film adaptations-of Coronado and Almereyda versions in particular- to elucidate the early modern- postmodern relations. By offering new insights to the question of subjectivity and closely analyzing movie adaptations of Hamlet, this book is a contribution to discussions in Shakespeare and Shakespearean film studies.