A Mindful Audience: Embodied Spectatorship in Early Modern Madrid (2016)

Madrid’s first permanent public theaters or corrales, Corral de la Cruz (1579) and Corral del Príncipe (1583), presented a unique architecture and organization that greatly influenced how spectators from diverse social backgrounds experienced drama. The design and mutable structure of the playhouses—coupled with the unstable economic, social, and political circumstances—contributed to the natural evolution of the Spanish playhouse. This dynamic context led to an increasingly complex experience for the spectators, who responded in various ways to the theater by embodying the performances in the physical space of the corral. Within cognitive literary studies, we find multiple approaches to theater and performance centered on “embodied spectatorship.” This chapter focuses on the embodied experience of the audience that attended the corrales in Madrid by framing its discussion within Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics, a discipline of theory and practice that offers an inclusive and innovative understanding of the relationship between mind and body.

“A Mindful Audience: Embodied Spectatorship in Early Modern Madrid.” Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature. Eds. Julien Simon and Isabel Jaén Portillo. Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 111-27.