Download or read book English Historical Drama 1500 1660 written by Barbara Ravelhofer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-12-04 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, exploring both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order discuss a wide variety of possible sources for historical drama, ranging from oral traditions to chronicles. They also explore genres outside the canon which think of 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities and closet drama.

Download or read book The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama written by Brian W. Schneider and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though individual prologues and epilogues have been treated in depth, very little scholarship has been published on early modern framing texts as a whole. The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama fills a gap in the literature by examining the origins of these texts, and investigating their growing importance and influence in the theatre of the period. This topic-led discussion of prologues and epilogues deals with the origins of these texts, the difficulty of definition, and the way in which many prologues and epilogues appear to interact on such subjects as the composition of the theatre audience and the perceived place of women in such an audience. Author Brian Schneider also examines the reasons for, and the evidence leading to, the apparently sudden burgeoning of these texts after the Restoration, when prologues and epilogues grace nearly all the dramas of the time and become a virtual cottage industry of their own. The second section-a comprehensive list of prologues and epilogues-details play titles, playwrights, theatres and theatre companies, first performance and the earliest edition in which the framing text(s) appears. It quotes the first line of the prologue and/or epilogue and uses the printer's signature to denote the page on which the texts can be found. Further information is provided in notes appended to the relevant entry. A final section deals with 'free-floating' and 'free-standing' framing texts that appear in verse collections, manuscripts, and other publications and to which no play can be positively ascribed. Combining original analysis with carefully compiled, comprehensive reference data, The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama provides a genuinely new angle on the drama of early modern England.

Download or read book Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama written by Natasha Korda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.

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 296 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 Early Modern Academic Drama written by Jonathan Walker and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to this collection argue for the importance of academic drama as a site of cultural production in England from 1500 to 1700. They explore how these plays address various aspects of culture, including the relationship between the academy and the state, the tensions between humanism and religious reform, the social profits and economic liabilities of formal education, and the increasing involvement of universities in the commercial market, among other issues.

Download or read book Europe s Languages on England s Stages 1590 1620 written by Marianne Montgomery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though representations of alien languages on the early modern stage have usually been read as mocking, xenophobic, or at the very least extremely anxious, listening closely to these languages in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Marianne Montgomery discerns a more complex reality. She argues instead that the drama of the early modern period holds up linguistic variety as a source of strength and offers playgoers a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that, while still sometimes anxious, complicates easy national distinctions. The study surveys six of the European languages heard on London's commercial stages during the three decades between 1590 and 1620-Welsh, French, Dutch, Spanish, Irish and Latin-and the distinct sets of cultural issues that they made audible. Exploring issues of culture and performance raised by representations of European languages on the stage, this book joins and advances two critical conversations on early modern drama. It both works to recover English relations with alien cultures in the period by looking at how such encounters were staged, and treats sound and performance as essential to understanding what Europe's languages meant in the theater. Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 contributes to our emerging sense of how local identities and global knowledge in early modern England were necessarily shaped by encounters with nearby lands, particularly encounters staged for aural consumption.

Download or read book The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caesarian power was a crucial context in the Renaissance, as rulers in Europe, Russia and Turkey all sought to appropriate Caesarian imagery and authority, but it has been surprisingly little explored in scholarship. In this study Lisa Hopkins explores the way in which the stories of the Caesars, and of the Julio-Claudians in particular, can be used to figure the stories of English rulers on the Renaissance stage. Analyzing plays by Shakespeare and a number of other playwrights of the period, she demonstrates how early modern English dramatists, using Roman modes of literary representation as cover, commented on the issues of the day and critiqued contemporary monarchs.

Download or read book Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres written by Matthew Steggle and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and when did Shakespeare's audiences laugh, and weep, in early modern theatres? And when laughter, or weeping, were represented on that stage-as they are in hundreds of plays from this period-how were they acted out? This book considers laughter and weeping in the theatres of 1550-1642, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.

Download or read book Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater written by Ronda Arab and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.

Download or read book Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England written by Gabriel A. Rieger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon recent scholarship in Renaissance studies regarding notions of the body, political, physical and social, this study examines how the satiric tragedians of the English Renaissance employ the languages of sex - including sexual slander, titillation, insinuation and obscenity - in the service of satiric aggression. There is a close association between the genre of satire and sexually descriptive language in the period, author Gabriel Rieger argues, particularly in the ways in which both the genre and the languages embody systems of oppositions. In exploring the various purposes which sexually descriptive language serves for the satiric tragedian, Rieger reviews a broad range of texts, ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary, by satiric tragedians, moralists, medical writers and critics, paying particular attention to the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and John Webster

Download or read book Boy Actors in Early Modern England written by Harry R. McCarthy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Harry R. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture.

Download or read book Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama written by Katharine Goodland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grieving women in early modern English drama, this study argues, recall not only those of Classical tragedy, but also, and more significantly, the lamenting women of medieval English drama, especially the Virgin Mary. Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster, this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. First, it explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England. Second, the author here brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past. Finally, Goodland addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were viewed as increasingly disturbing after the Reformation. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama synthesizes and is relevant to several areas of recent scholarly interest, including the performance of gender, the history of emotion, studies of death and mourning, and the cultural trauma of the Reformation.

Download or read book English Drama written by Alexander Leggatt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important period in the history of English drama is revealed in Alexander Leggatt's challenging account. The author considers English drama from the beginning of Shakespeare's career to the restoration of Charles II. Focusing on Shakespeare and the development of his art, he examines all his major contemporaries: Jonson, Middleton, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher and Ford. He combines close analysis of specific plays with a broader look at trends within drama.

Download or read book Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England written by David K. Anderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Webster and John Milton, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England argues that the English tragedians reflected an unease within the culture to acts of religious violence. David Anderson explores a link between the unstable emotional response of society to religious executions in the Tudor-Stuart period, and the revival of tragic drama as a major cultural form for the first time since classical antiquity. Placing John Foxe at the center of his historical argument, Anderson argues that Foxe’s Book of Martyrs exerted a profound effect on the social conscience of English Protestantism in his own time and for the next century. While scholars have in recent years discussed the impact of Foxe and the martyrs on the period’s literature, this book is the first to examine how these most vivid symbols of Reformation-era violence influenced the makers of tragedy. As the persecuting and the persecuted churches collided over the martyr’s body, Anderson posits, stress fractures ran through the culture and into the playhouse; in their depictions of violence, the early modern tragedians focused on the ethical confrontation between collective power and the individual sufferer. Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England sheds new light on the particular emotional energy of Tudor-Stuart tragedy, and helps explain why the genre reemerged at this time.

Download or read book Licensing Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England written by R. Dutton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-11-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England examines in detail both how the practice of censorship shaped writing in the Shakespearean period, and how our sense of that censorship continues to shape modern understandings of what was written. Separate chapters trace the development of licensing in the theatre, and the response of the actors and dramatists to it. There are detailed examinations of how censorship affects our reading of four major playwrights: Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and Middleton, and of how the control of printed books compared with that of the stage.

Download or read book Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama 1558 1642 written by J. Low and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-25 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection builds on the latest research on the topic of theatre audiences in early modern England. In broad terms, the project answers the question, 'How do we define the relationships between performance and audience?'.

Download or read book Performance and Religion in Early Modern England written by Matthew J. Smith and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture. Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures. Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.