Alumni College Fellow

Matthew Hunter

Stranger Styles: Forms of Talk on the Early Modern Stage

To go out into public is to assemble a self that is different from the person we are in private. Our public encounters place us in the company of strangers--open to their scrutiny, their approval, their contact--and they turn us into strangers, too. The strategies and scripts that we have for engaging in public behavior are numerous; they range from fashionable dress to commodified talk to calculated, bodily hexis, and their proliferation is a testament to how normalized 'the public' has become as an animating condition of our social interaction. But in the London of Shakespeare's moment, the public was a new and vexing feature of urban life. At the turn of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth, the city was expanding at an exponential rate; a town of some 50,000 in 1500 had ballooned, by 1600, into a city of over 200,000. A consequence of this rapid influx of residents was that "everyone," in the words of one Londoner, "live[d] in the eye of others." Everyone, in other words, was unnervingly public to everyone else. Stranger Styles shows that the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries provided a compelling solution to the novel problem of urban life. At a moment when the arts of language held a cultural capital that would never again be equalled, the varied styles of plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and others furnished audiences with scripts for comporting themselves in public. Placing close readings of early modern drama in conversation with conversation manuals, rhetorical treatises, and commonplace books, Stranger Styles tells the story of how language shapes the social relations it depicts. It is a story that is still with us today.

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