Download or read book Medieval Drama written by Greg Walker and published by Blackwell Publishing. This book was released on 2000-10-03 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of drama in English contains plays from the late 14th century to the onset of the Renaissance. It brings together selections from all the major dramatic genres to provide a sense of the breadth and depth of medieval dramatic activity.
Download or read book Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater written by Michael Norton and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expression "liturgical drama" was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. This ground-breaking work examines "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them.
Download or read book Medieval English Drama written by Katie Normington and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval English Drama provides a fresh introduction to the dramatic and festive practices of England in the late Middle Ages. The book places particular emphasis on the importance of the performance contexts of these events, bringing to life a period before permanent theatre buildings when performances took place in a wide variety of locations and had to fight to attract and maintain the attention of an audience. Showing the interplay between dramatic and everyday life, the book covers performances in convents, churches, parishes, street processions and parades, and in particular distinguishes between modes of outdoor and indoor performance. Katie Normington aids the reader to a fuller understanding of these early English dramatic practices by explaining the significance of the place of performance, the particularities of spectatorship for each event and how the conventions of the form of drama were manipulated to address its reception. Audiences considered range from cloistered members, congregations and parish members to urban citizens, nobles and royalty. Undergraduate students of literature of this period will find this an approachable and illuminating guide.
Download or read book The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama written by Christina M. Fitzgerald and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical drama—has been fundamentally altered. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays. Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.
Download or read book The Ambivalences of Medieval Religious Drama written by Rainer Warning and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is medieval religious drama, and what function does it serve in negotiating between the domains of theology and popular life? This book aims to answer these questions by studying three sets of these dramas from Germany, France, England, and Spain: 10th-century Easter plays, 12th-century Adam plays, and 15th- and 16th-century Passion plays.
Download or read book Medieval Drama written by David Bevington and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 1105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reprint (with updated 'Suggestions for Further Reading') of the Houghton Mifflin edition makes David Bevington's classic anthology of medieval drama available again at an affordable price.
Download or read book Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages written by O. B. Hardison Jr. and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1965. The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis—the earliest of all medieval dramas—is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.
Download or read book Drama Play and Game written by Lawrence M. Clopper and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question. Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.
Download or read book Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends written by Jody Enders and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-05-15 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of every legend is true. Or so argues Jody Enders in this fascinating look at early French drama and the way it compels us to consider where the stage ends and where real life begins. This ambitious and bracing study explores fourteen tales of the theater that are at turns dark and dangerous, sexy and scandalous, humorous and frightening—stories that are nurtured by the confusion between truth and fiction, and imitation and enactment, until it becomes impossible to tell whether life is imitating art, or art is imitating life. Was a convicted criminal executed on stage during a beheading scene? Was an unfortunate actor driven insane while playing a madman? Did a theatrical enactment of a crucifixion result in a real one? Did an androgynous young man seduce a priest when portraying a female saint? Enders answers these and other questions while presenting a treasure trove of tales that have long seemed true but are actually medieval urban legends. On topics ranging through politics, religion, marriage, class, and law, these tales, Enders argues, do the cultural work of all urban legends: they disclose the hopes, fears, and anxieties of their tellers. Each one represents a medieval meditation created or dramatized by the theater with its power to blur the line between fiction and reality, engaging anyone who watches, performs, or is represented by it. Each one also raises pressing questions about the medieval and modern world on the eve of the Reformation, when Europe had never engaged more anxiously and fervently in the great debate about what was real, what was pretend, and what was pretense. Written with elegance and flair, and meticulously researched, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends will interest scholars of medieval and Renaissance literature, history, theater, performance studies, and anyone curious about urban legends.
Download or read book Stages of Dismemberment written by Margaret E. Owens and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study has essentially two focuses, two stories to tell. One story traces the secularization, theatricalization, and uncanny returns of suppressed religious culture in early modern drama. The other story concerns the tendency of the theater to expose contingencies and gaps in politico-judicial practices of spectacular violence." "The investigation covers a broad range of plays dating from the fifteenth century to the closing of the theatres in 1642; however, three chapters are devoted to extensive analysis of single plays: R.B.'s Apius and Virginia, Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus."--Jacket.
Download or read book Crime and Punishment in Medieval Chinese Drama written by George A. Hayden and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides full annotated translations of three previously untranslated Yuan-Ming Judge Pao courtroom dramas.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre written by Richard Beadle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-10 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition continues to provide an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters, including one on the cultural significance of early drama. A thoroughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.
Download or read book The Medieval Theater of Cruelty written by Jody Enders and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.
Download or read book A Common Stage written by Carol Symes and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : locating a medieval theater -- A history play : the Jeu de saint Nicolas and the world of Arras -- Prodigals and jongleurs : initiative and agency in a theater town -- Access to the media : publicity, participation, and the public sphere -- Relics and rites : "The play of the bower" and other plays -- Lives in the theater -- Conclusion : on looking into a medieval theater.
Download or read book Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England written by Meg Twycross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on broad research, this study explores the different social and theatrical masking activities in England during the Middle Ages and the early 16th century. The authors present a coherent explanation of the many functions of masking, emphasizing the important links among festive practice, specialized ceremonial, and drama. They elucidate the intellectual, moral and social contexts for masking, and they examine the purposes and rewards for participants in the activity. The authors' insight into the masking games and performances of England's medieval and early Tudor periods illuminates many aspects of the thinking and culture of the times: issues of identity and community; performance and role-play; conceptions of the psyche and of the individual's position in social and spiritual structures. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England presents a broad overview of masking practices, demonstrating how active and prominent an element of medieval and pre-modern culture masking was. It has obvious interest for drama and literature critics of the medieval and early modern periods; but is also useful for historians of culture, theatre and anthropology. Through its analysis of masked play this study engages both with the history of theatre and performance, and with broader cultural and historical questions of social organization, identity and the self, the performance of power, and shifting spiritual understanding.
Download or read book Early English Performance Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games written by John Marshall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering a period of nearly 40 years’ work by the author this collection of essays in the Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies series brings the perspective of a Drama academic and practitioner of early English plays to the understanding of how medieval plays and Robin Hood games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were performed. It explores why, where, when, and how the plays happened, who took part, and who were the audiences. The insights are informed by a combination of research and the public presentation of surviving texts. The research included in the volume unites the early English experiences of religious and secular performance. This recognition challenges the dominant critical distinction of the past between the two and the consequent privileging of biblical and moral plays over secular entertainments. What further binds, rather than separates, the two is that the destination of funds raised by the different activities maintained the civic and parochial needs of the institutions upon which the people depended. This collection redefines the inclusive nature and common interests of the purposes that lay behind generically different undertakings. They shared an extraordinary investment of human and financial resources in the anticipation of a profit that was pious and practical. (CS1081).
Download or read book The Theater of Devotion written by Gail McMurray Gibson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary study of drama, arts, and spirituality, Gail Gibson provides a provocative reappraisal of fifteenth-century English theater through a detailed portrait of the flourishing cultures of Suffolk and Norfolk. By emphasizing the importance of the Incarnation of Christ as a model and justification for late medieval drama and art, Gibson challenges currently held views of the secularization of late medieval culture.
