ABSTRACT
How did Shakespeare contribute to the reformation of social space in early modern England? My claim here is that the early modern English theater helped create a public life for those the period would have called “private” people and that the theater achieved this innovation by making space public in new ways for new inhabitants, especially by changing the ways ordinary people saw and were seen. On this account, public space is something people make rather than something simply given, and one way that they make space public is by how they look at each other and the world and by how they make their appearance to others. The new configuration of space and vision and the new practices of looking in the playhouse trained the assembled playgoers to form complex, collaborative and self-disclosing judgments. Not that the rethinking of public space in the playhouse translated into a wholesale change in early modern social spatiality. My general argument, and that of the members of the Making Publics project, is that the publics of theater, science, visual art, music and so on introduced new forms of association, language, identity and space; together, these publics wrought deep and durable social changes, among which was a shift in the relationship between the zones of the private and the public, which led to a corresponding advancement in the social condition of private people. 1
