• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.2
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• pp.279-304
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• 2012

Since the publication of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, theatricality has become one of the key concepts in New Historicism. By defining theatricality as the most definitive feature of early modern society and culture, New Historicists have promoted the idea that theatrical practices in every day life were eventually replaced by textual practices as the western society started to undergo modernization with the advent of print culture and technologies. This paper questions this linear model of English literature, the shift of literary practices from theatricality to textuality in the event of modernization, by closely looking at the ways in which newsbooks and playlets during the English civil wars appealed to their target readers. The early print-based literary commodities during the English civil war (i.e. newsbooks and playlets) were able to win the attention of their audience not by breaking away from theatrical energy and creativity but instead by embracing and taking advantage of them through the use of dramatic conventions, dialogues, and many others. The newsbooks and the playlets during the time, however, did not simply replicate the dramatic forms and experiences of the previous generation. Instead, as the case study of Craftie Cromwell exemplifies, they went further to produce a different mode of theatricality by reshaping everyday lives into serialized drama, whose resolution is always already delayed and postponed into the ever-receding future. In conclusion, the study of the newsbook and playlets during the civil wars suggests that the textuality of modern times, materialized in print forms, have been co-evolved with the development of new theatricality, whose contents and forms are susceptible to the changes of everyday reality.