Download or read book Early Modern Drama and the Bible written by A. Streete and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern drama is steeped in biblical language, imagery and stories. This collection examines the pervasive presence of scripture on the early modern stage. Exploring plays by writers such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster, the contributors show how theatre offers a site of public and communal engagement with the Bible.
Download or read book Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama written by Eva von Contzen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteen chapters in this collection open up new horizons for the study of biblical drama by putting special emphasis on multitemporality, the intersections of biblical narrative and performance, and the strategies employed by playwrights to rework and adapt the biblical source material in Catholic, Protestant and Jewish culture. Aspects under scrutiny include dramatic traditions, confessional and religious rites, dogmas and debates, conceptualisations of performance, and audience response. The contributors stress the co-presence of biblical and contemporary concerns in the periods under discussion, conceiving of biblical drama as a central participant in the dynamic struggle to both interpret and translate the Bible.
Download or read book The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama written by Elizabeth Williamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama is the first book to present a detailed examination of early modern theatrical properties informed by the complexity of post-Reformation religious practice. Although English Protestant reformers set out to destroy all vestiges of Catholic idolatry, public theater companies frequently used stage properties to draw attention to the remnants of traditional religion as well as the persistent materiality of post-Reformation worship. The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama explores the relationship between popular culture and theatrical performance by considering the social history and dramatic function of these properties, addressing their role as objects of devotion, idolatry, and remembrance on the professional stage. Rather than being aligned with identifiably Catholic or Protestant values, the author reveals how religious stage properties functioned as fulcrums around which more subtle debates about the status of Christian worship played out. Given the relative lack of existing documentation on stage properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama employs a wide range of source materials-including inventories published in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes-to account for the material presence of these objects on the public stage. By combining historical research on popular religion with detailed readings of the scripts themselves, the book fills a gap in our knowledge about the physical qualities of the stage properties used in early modern productions. Tracing the theater's appropriation of highly charged religious properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama provides a new framework for understanding the canonization of early modern plays, especially those of Shakespeare.
Download or read book Apocalypse and Anti Catholicism in Seventeenth Century English Drama written by Adrian Streete and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Streete studies the political uses of apocalyptic and anti-Catholic rhetoric in a wide range of seventeenth-century English drama, focusing on the plays of Marston, Middleton, Massinger, and Dryden. Drawing on recent work in religious and political history, he rethinks how religion is debated in the early modern theatre.
Download or read book Prodigality in Early Modern Drama written by Ezra Horbury and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.
Download or read book Religion and Drama in Early Modern England written by Elizabeth Williamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.
Download or read book Biblical women in early modern literary culture 1550 1700 written by Victoria Brownlee and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 draws attention to the complex ways in which biblical women’s narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. Considering a confessionally diverse range of writers, working across a variety of genres, this volume reveals how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records. The essays explore how the Bible’s women are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comment on issues including female authority, speech and sexuality, and in discussions of doctrine, confessional politics, exploration and grief. As it explores the rich ideological currency of the Bible’s women in early modern culture, this volume demonstrates that the Bible’s women are persistently difficult to evade.
Download or read book Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England 1558 1625 written by Victoria Brownlee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and bible-reading shaped the period's drama, poetry, and life-writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This volume provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England. It maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing and argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period's dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ's mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible's narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. In showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.
Download or read book The Political Bible in Early Modern England written by Kevin Killeen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how it provided a key language of political debate.
Download or read book The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama 1620 1650 written by Julie Sanders and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary geographies is an exciting new area of interdisciplinary research. Innovative and engaging, this book applies theories of landscape, space and place from the discipline of cultural geography within an early modern historical context. Different kinds of drama and performance are analyzed: from commercial drama by key playwrights to household masques and entertainment performed by families and in semi-official contexts. Sanders provides a fresh look at works from the careers of Ben Jonson, John Milton and Richard Brome, paying attention to geographical spaces and habitats like forests, coastlines and arctic landscapes of ice and snow, as well as the more familiar locales of early modern country estates and city streets and spaces. Overall, the book encourages readers to think about geography as kinetic, embodied and physical, not least in its literary configurations, presenting a key contribution to early modern scholarship.
Download or read book The Social Universe of the English Bible written by Naomi Tadmor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds light on the shaping of the English Bible and its impact on early modern English society and culture.
Download or read book Apocalypse and Anti Catholicism in Seventeenth Century English Drama written by Adrian Streete and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the many and varied uses of apocalyptic and anti-Catholic language in seventeenth-century English drama. Adrian Streete argues that this rhetoric is not simply an expression of religious bigotry, nor is it only deployed at moments of political crisis. Rather, it is an adaptable and flexible language with national and international implications. It offers a measure of cohesion and order in a volatile century. By rethinking the relationship between theatre, theology and polemic, Streete shows how playwrights exploited these connections for a diverse range of political ends. Chapters focus on playwrights like Marston, Middleton, Massinger, Shirley, Dryden and Lee, and on a range of topics including imperialism, reason of state, commerce, prostitution, resistance, prophecy, church reform and liberty. Drawing on important recent work in religious and political history, this is a major re-interpretation of how and why religious ideas are debated in the early modern theatre.
Download or read book Biblical References in Shakespeare s Plays written by Naseeb Shaheen and published by University of Delaware. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 982 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hundreds of biblical references in Shakespeare's plays give ample evidence that he was well acquainted with Scripture. Not only is the range of his biblical references impressive, but also the aptness with which he makes them. Hamlet and Othello each have more than fifty biblical references. No study of Shakespeare's plays is complete that ignores Shakespeare's use of scripture. The Bibles that Shakespeare knew, however, were not those that are in use today. By the time the King James Bible appeared in 1611, Shakespeare's career was all but over, and the Anglican liturgy that is evident in his plays is likewise one that few persons are acquainted with. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of the English Bibles of Shakespeare's day, notes their similarities and differences, and indicates which version the playwright knew best. The thorny question of what constitutes a valid biblical reference is also discussed. The study of Shakespeare's biblical references is not based on secondary sources. The author owned one of the world's largest collections of early English bibles, including over one hundred copies of the Geneva bible and numerous editions of other Bibles, prayer books, and books of homilies of Shakespeare's day. To be of real worth, a study of Shakespeare's biblical references should also enable the reader to determine which references Shakespeare borrowed from his plot sources and which he added from his own memory as part of his design for the play. The author studies every source that Shakespeare is known to have read or consulted before writing each play and has examined the biblical references in those sources. Shaheen then points out which biblical references in his literary sources Shakespeare accepted, and how he adapted them in his plays. This information is especially valuable when assessing the theological meanings that are sometimes imposed on his plays, meanings that often go beyond what Shakespeare intended or what his audience must have understood. Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays is considerably broader in scope than any other study of its kind and provides the scholarly checks and balances in dealing with the subject that previous studies lacked. .
Download or read book Shakespeare s Curse written by Björn Quiring and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceptualizing the curse as the representation of a foundational, mythical violence that is embedded within juridical discourse, Shakespeare’s Curse:The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama pursues a reading of Richard III, King John, and King Lear in order to analyse the persistence of imprecations in the discourses of modernity. Shakespeare wrote during a period that was transformative in the development of juridical thinking. However, taking up the relationship between theater, theology and law, Björn Quiring argues that the curse was not eliminated from legal discourses during this modernization of jurisprudence; rather, it persisted and to this day continues to haunt numerous speech acts. Drawing on the work of Derrida, Lacan, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, among others, Quiring analyses the performativity of the curse, and tracks its power through the juristic themes that are pursued within Shakespeare’s plays – such as sovereignty, legitimacy, succession, obligation, exception, and natural law. Thus, this book provides an original and important insight into early modern legal developments, as well as a fresh perspective on some of Shakespeare’s best known works. A fascinating interdisciplinary study, this book will interest students and scholars of Law, Literature, and History.
Download or read book Everyman and Mankind written by Douglas Bruster and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyman and Mankind are morality plays which mark the turn of the medieval period to the early modern, with their focus on the individual. Everyman follows a man's journey towards death and his efforts to secure himself a life thereafter, whilst Mankind shows a man battling with temptation and sin, often with great humour. Both texts are modernised here and edited to the highest standards of scholarship, with full on-page commentaries giving the depth of information and insight associated with all Arden editions. The comprehensive, illustrated introduction argues that the plays signal the birth of the early modern consciousness and puts them in their historic and religious contexts. An account is also given of the staging and performance history of the plays and their critical history and significance. With a wealth of helpful and incisive commentary this is the finest edition of the plays available.
Download or read book The Transformations of Tragedy written by Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Transformations of Tragedy explores different Christian influences, from the Early Modern to Modern periods, upon the development of post-classical Western tragedy.
Download or read book Religious Dissimulation and Early Modern Drama written by Kilian Schindler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kilian Schindler examines how playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe represented religious dissimulation on stage and argues that debates about the legitimacy of dissembling one's faith were closely bound up with early modern conceptions of theatricality. Considering both Catholic and Protestant perspectives on religious dissimulation in the absence of full toleration, Schindler demonstrates its ubiquity and urgency in early modern culture. By reconstructing the ideological undercurrents that inform both religious dissimulation and theatricality as a form of dissimulation, this book makes a case for the centrality of dissimulation in the religious politics of early modern drama. Lucid and original, this study is an important contribution to the understanding of early modern religious and literary culture.
