"An important work of scholarship, this book shows that the flowering of English Renaissance drama produced or was in part fostered by, the emergence of a new class of readers. Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote for readers as well as audiences and the modern age was born." - Susan Rowland, PhD. Professor of English and Jungian Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, California."For scholars interested in the problem of audiences and play reception, Akihiro Yamada's Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance: Readers and Audiences is a perfect book to read since it takes up the question from the point of view of print, rather than performance." - Henry S. Turner, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500 - 1900, Vol 58, No 2, 2018"What is most striking on reading the book is its sheer level of detail as well as the scope of his [Yamada's] research."- Peter Sutton, University of St Andrews"All in all, Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance is a major scholarly achievement, attesting to the author's exceptional expertise in English Renaissance drama, bibliographical criticism and paleography. This book, with its numerous statistical tables and the bibliographic details presented in its main body and appendixes, provides invaluable information on the progress of literacy, the expansion of book readership, stationers' activities, dramatic audiences, and the performance and publication of drama in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, as well as on dramatic manuscripts and early modern readers of playbooks."- Kazuaki Ota, Shakespeare Studies
