Download or read book Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage written by Peter Hyland and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study, Hyland examines various conceptual and practical issues that provide a background to theatrical disguise and goes on to consider a range of plays under three broad headings: moral issues, social issues, and aesthetic issues.
Download or read book Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage written by Professor Peter Hyland and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays, and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study Peter Hyland considers a range of practical issues related to the performance of disguise. He goes on to examine various conceptual issues that provide a background to theatrical disguise (the relation of self and "other", the meaning of mask and performance). He looks at many disguise plays under three broad headings. He considers moral issues (the almost universal association of disguise with "evil"); social issues (sumptuary legislation, clothing, and the theatre, and constructions of class, gender and national or racial identity); and aesthetic issues (disguise as an emblem of theatre, and the significance of disguise for the dramatic artist). The study serves to examine the significant ways in which disguise devices have been used in early modern drama in England.
Download or read book Civic and Medical Worlds in Early Modern England written by E. Decamp and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through its rich foray into popular literary culture and medical history, this book investigates representations of regular and irregular medical practice in early modern England. Focusing on the prolific figures of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon, the author explores what it meant to the early modern population for a group of practitioners to be associated with both the trade guilds and an emerging professional medical world. The book uncovers the differences and cross-pollinations between barbers and surgeons' practices which play out across the literature: we learn not only about their cultural, civic, medical and occupational histories but also about how we should interpret patterns in language, name choice, performance, materiality, acoustics and semiology in the period. The investigations prompt new readings of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Beaumont, among others. And with chapters delving into early modern representations of medical instruments, hairiness, bloodletting procedures, waxy or infected ears, wart removals and skeletons, readers will find much of the contribution of this book is in its detail, which brings its subject to life.
Download or read book The Image and Perception of Monarchy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Sean McGlynn and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monarchy is an enduring institution that still makes headlines today. It has always been preoccupied with image and perception, never more so than in the period covered by this volume. The collection of papers gathered here from international scholars demonstrates that monarchical image and perception went far beyond cultural, symbolic and courtly display – although these remain important – and were, in fact, always deeply concerned with the practical expression of authority, politics and power. This collection is unique in that it covers the subject from two innovative angles: it not only addresses both kings and queens together, but also both the medieval and early modern periods. Consequently, this allows significant comparisons to be made between male and female monarchy as well as between eras. Such an approach reveals that continuity was arguably more important than change over a span of some five centuries. In removing the traditional gender and chronological barriers that tend to lead to four separate areas of studies for kings and queens in medieval and early modern history, the papers here are free to encompass male and female royal rulers ranging across Europe from the early-thirteenth to the late-seventeenth centuries to examine the image and perception of monarchy in England, Scotland, France, Burgundy, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Collectively this volume will be of interest to all those studying medieval and early modern monarchy and for those wishing to learn about the connections and differences between the two.
Download or read book The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries written by Kevin A. Quarmby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early seventeenth century, the London stage often portrayed a ruler covertly spying on his subjects. Traditionally deemed 'Jacobean disguised ruler plays', these works include Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Marston's The Malcontent and The Fawn, Middleton's The Phoenix, and Sharpham's The Fleer. Commonly dated to the arrival of James I, these plays are typically viewed as synchronic commentaries on the Jacobean regime. Kevin A. Quarmby demonstrates that the disguised ruler motif actually evolved in the 1580s. It emerged from medieval folklore and balladry, Tudor Chronicle history and European tragicomedy. Familiar on the Elizabethan stage, these incognito rulers initially offered light-hearted, romantic entertainment, only to suffer a sinister transformation as England awaited its ageing queen's demise. The disguised royal had become a dangerously voyeuristic political entity by the time James assumed the throne. Traditional critical perspectives also disregard contemporary theatrical competition. Market demands shaped the repertories. Rivalry among playing companies guaranteed the motif's ongoing vitality. The disguised ruler's presence in a play reassured audiences; it also facilitated a subversive exploration of contemporary social and political issues. Gradually, the disguised ruler's dramatic currency faded, but the figure remained vibrant as an object of parody until the playhouses closed in the 1640s.
Download or read book Inventions of the Skin written by Andrea Stevens and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the painted body of the actor on the early modern stage. Inventions of the Skin illuminates a history of the stage technology of paint that extends backward to the 1460s York cycle and forward to the 1630s. Organized as a series of studies, the four chapters of this book examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play, with special attention to the pageant representing The Transfiguration of Christ; bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, specifically blood's unexpected role as a device for disguise in plays such as Look About You (anon.) and Shakespeare's Coriolanus; racial masquerade within seventeenth-century court performances and popular plays, from Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness to William Berkeley's The Lost Lady; and finally whiteface, death, and stoniness"e; in Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Recovering a crucial grammar of theatrical representation, this book argues that the onstage embodiment of characters--not just the words written for them to speak--forms an important and overlooked aspect of stage representation.
Download or read book Unfixable Forms written by Katherine Schaap Williams and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.
Download or read book Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama written by Lindsey Row-Heyveld and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? This book uncovers a previously unexamined theatrical tradition and explores the way counterfeit disability captivated the Renaissance stage. Through detailed case studies of both lesser-known and canonical plays (by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and others), Lindsey Row-Heyveld demonstrates why counterfeit disability proved so useful to early modern playwrights. Changing approaches to almsgiving in the English Reformation led to increasing concerns about feigned disability. The theater capitalized on those concerns, using the counterfeit-disability tradition to explore issues of charity, epistemology, and spectatorship. By illuminating this neglected tradition, this book fills an important gap in both disability history and literary studies, and explores how fears of counterfeit disability created a feedback loop of performance and suspicion. The result is the still-pervasive insistence that even genuinely disabled people must perform in order to, paradoxically, prove the authenticity of their impairments.
Download or read book The Absence of America written by Gavin Hollis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576â1642 examines why early modern drama's response to English settlement in the New World was muted, even though the so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration: no play is set in the Americas; few plays treat colonization as central to the plot; a handful features Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise). However, advocates of colonialism in the seventeenth century denounced playing companies as enemies on a par with the Pope and the Devil. Instead of writing off these accusers as paranoid cranks, this book takes as its starting point the possibility that they were astute playgoers. By so doing we can begin to see the emergence of a "picture of America," and of the Virginia colony in particular, across a number of plays performed for London audiences: Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and his collaboration with Marston and Chapman, Eastward Ho!; Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso; Massinger's The City Madam; Massinger and Fletcher's The Sea Voyage; Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl; Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Fletcher and Shakespeare's Henry VIII. We can glean the significance of this picture, not only for the troubled Virginia Company, but also for London theater audiences. And we can see that the picture that was beginning to form was, as the anti-theatricalists surmised, often slanderous, condemnatory, and, as it were, anti-American.
Download or read book JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology written by Gustaf E. Karsten and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book William Langland s Piers Plowman written by William Langland and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1996-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum
Download or read book Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre written by Richard Preiss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Preiss presents a lively and provocative study of how the ever-popular stage clown shaped early modern playhouse theatre.
Download or read book Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage written by Pauline Blanc and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelve essays in Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage analyse the influences that shaped the fictional constructs that inhabited the drama of the early modern period. The contributors, all specialists in the field working in France and England, offer a wide spectrum of views and discuss a variety of dramatic texts ranging from late medieval cycle plays and interludes of the Tudor period, to plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Tourneur and Jonson. The early modern stage self emerges out of this collection as the site of a rich confluence of discursive and historical forces existing beyond the theatre itself. Three essays in the first section reveal how abstract figures like Mundus and Mankind gradually became endowed with personal motives and personalizing traits which brought into existence stage beings with a capacity for emotion. In the second section, three essays deal with specific cultural factors that influenced the representation of selfhood in John Lylyâ (TM)s Alexander, in Marloweâ (TM)s Tamburlaine, and in a selection of Stuart court masques presented at Whitehall. The third section offers new insights into the composition of Hamlet as a dramatized personality; the fourth investigates the way in which the poet-playwrightâ (TM)s autobiographical impulses may have helped in the construction of early modern stage selves; the final, fifth section explores the kaleidoscopic sources of the royal protagonists in Rowleyâ (TM)s When You See Me, You Know Me, and Shakespeareâ (TM)s Richard III. This collection of essays seeks to add a further contribution to the growing body of criticism that investigates the multi-facetted, multi-layered construction of early modern subjectivity.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama 1576 1642 written by Julie Sanders and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-20 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating introduction to the drama of the early modern era, through a focus on commercial playhouses and their repertoires.
Download or read book Philaster 1622 written by Francis Beaumont and published by . This book was released on 1687 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Inventions of the Skin written by Andrea Ria Stevens and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the narrative of Shakespeare's 'bare' stage by looking at the 'ground zero' of early modern theatrical representation: the painted body of the actor. It questions the boundaries of the period categories 'mediaeval' and 'early modern' by demonstrating important continuities in theatrical labour and theatrical materials from mediaeval cycle drama through to the popular and courtly drama of the 1630s.
Download or read book Discoveries on the Early Modern Stage written by Leslie Thomson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a study of the dramatic use, treatment, and staging of performed 'discoveries' - actions which the theatre is uniquely able to exploit visually and explore verbally. The motif of discovery - in the now almost obsolete sense of uncovering or disclosing - is prominent in the language and action of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline plays. Visual discoveries are used repeatedly through the period by virtually every playwright, regardless of company or venue. These discoveries are of two different but related kinds: the disguise discovery - the removal of a disguise to uncover identity; and the discovery scene - the opening of curtains or doors to reveal a place or the removal of a lid or cover to effect a disclosure. This is the first analysis of staged discoveries as such; in it I show how and why these actions are essential to the way a play dramatizes and explores such interrelated matters as deception, privacy, secrecy, and truth; knowledge, justice, and renewal"--
