Download or read book English Parish Drama written by Alexandra F. Johnston and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1996 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays presents the multiplicity of dramatic and paradramatic activity that flourished in medieval and early modern England at the parish level. The evidence here adduced is largely from churchwardens' accounts and from the records of the ecclesiastical courts. The book contains ten articles that consider the various money making ventures undertaken by English parishes for the support of the church. The authors study subjects ranging from paradramatic activities such as rushbearing, dancing and bull and bear baiting through more hybrid and problematical events such as the king games and Robin Hood gatherings and plays, to what can be considered 'true' drama with sets, props, texts and actors. All the contributors are editors in the Records of Early English Drama project and bring to their material the insights of scholars working with original material in what are still only partially charted waters. »Ludus« intends to introduce those interested in literature, in the performing arts, or in history to the various aspects of theatre and drama from the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. It publishes books on closely defined topics, mostly seen from a comparative point of view.
Download or read book English Parish Drama written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays presents the multiplicity of dramatic and paradramatic activity that flourished in medieval and early modern England at the parish level. The evidence here adduced is largely from churchwardens' accounts and from the records of the ecclesiastical courts. The book contains ten articles that consider the various money making ventures undertaken by English parishes for the support of the church. The authors study subjects ranging from paradramatic activities such as rushbearing, dancing and bull and bear baiting through more hybrid and problematical events such as the king games and Robin Hood gatherings and plays, to what can be considered 'true' drama with sets, props, texts and actors. All the contributors are editors in the Records of Early English Drama project and bring to their material the insights of scholars working with original material in what are still only partially charted waters. »Ludus« intends to introduce those interested in literature, in the performing arts, or in history to the various aspects of theatre and drama from the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. It publishes books on closely defined topics, mostly seen from a comparative point of view.
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 Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society 1485 1660 written by Paul Whitfield White and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines theatre and religion in provincial England from the early Tudors to 1660.
Download or read book The City and the Parish Drama in York and Beyond written by Alexandra F. Johnston and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected Studies CS1062 This volume brings together a selection of the major articles of Alexandra F. Johnston, which along with similar volumes by the late David Mills, Peter Meredith and Meg Twycross makes up a set of "Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies". Alexandra Johnston, the founding director of the research project, Records of Early English Drama, is one of these four key scholars whose work has had a profound influence on the study of medieval and early modern English drama. This collection of essays focuses especially on the York plays: on the Mercers’ documents that initiated the project itself; on the theology and christology of the plays; on the relationship between the plays and contemporary administrative bodies, both civic and national; and on the performance of the York plays in modern times. A further group of articles considers documentary evidence for the wide range of drama and mimetic ceremony in the Midlands and the West Country, reinforcing our understanding that these events took place predominately on a local parish level. The collection is rounded out with a survey of the immense changes that our reading of early English drama have undergone over the past half century.
Download or read book Music in Early English Religious Drama Minstrels playing written by Richard Rastall and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1996 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MEDIUM AEVUM says of Heaven Singing, the general discussion of the subject from which the present volume follows on with examination of the individual plays: 'A formidable achievement, indispensable for any serious and comprehensive study of early English drama.'
Download or read book English Drama Before Shakespeare written by Peter Happe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English Drama before Shakespeare surveys the range of dramatic activity in English up to 1590. The book challenges the traditional divisions between Medieval and Renaissance literature by showing that there was much continuity throughout this period, in spite of many innovations. The range of dramatic activity includes well-known features such as mystery cycles and the interludes, as well as comedy and tragedy. Para-dramatic activity such as the liturgical drama, royal entries and localised or parish drama is also covered. Many of the plays considered are anonymous, but a coherent, biographical view can be taken of the work of known dramatists such as John Heywood, John Bale, and Christopher Marlowe. Peter Happé's study is based upon close reading of selected plays, especially from the mystery cycles and such Elizabethan works as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. It takes account of contemporary research into dramatic form, performance (including some important recent revivals), dramatic sites and early theatre buildings, and the nature of early dramatic texts. Recent changes in outlook generated by the publication of the written records of early drama form part of the book's focus. There is an extensive bibliography covering social and political background, the lives and works of individual authors, and the development of theatrical ideas through the period. The book is aimed at undergraduates, as well as offering an overview for more advanced students and researchers in drama and in related fields of literature and cultural studies.
Download or read book REED in Review written by Audrey W. Douglas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen essays amplifying the content of selected conference papers, and a fourteenth submitted at the editors' invitation, make up REED in Review.
Download or read book Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays written by Peter Happé and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays is centred upon the five extant English mystery cycles with a view to examining the cyclic form they share. It is based upon consideration of the differences between the texts and upon the underlying assumptions governing this dramatic form. The cycles are extensively compared with practices in the cyclic dramas of France, the German-speaking areas, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain in the late middle ages and the early modern period. There is also a unique and innovative bridging with iconographical material from a range of artistic modes giving further insight into the structure and organisation of cyclic form. Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays should be of interest to undergraduate students and to more experienced researchers in the early drama and the study of visual images and artefacts.
Download or read book A New History of Early English Drama written by John D. Cox and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-six original essays by leading theorists and historians of the pre-seventeenth-century English stage chart a paradigmatic shift within the field. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on individual authors, the contributors to this storehouse of new historical information and critical insight explore the place of the stage within the larger society, as well as issues of performance and physical space, providing an innovative approach to both literary studies and cultural history.
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 Renaissance Drama the English Church Year written by Rudolph Chris Hassel and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important and original study demonstrates the existence of a tradition of performance at court of plays and masques which are relevant to the feast day of their performance. Evidence has long been available in the records compiled by E.K. Chambers and Gerald Eades Bentley that the plays and masques which entertained the English court from 1510 through 1640 were likely to occur on the same ten festivals of the English church year. During Elizabeth's reign nine of every ten recorded court performances occur on one of the seven holy days between Christmas and Ash Wednesday. During the Jacobean and Caroline periods, Eastertide, Michaelmas, and Hallowmas performances are added to the tradition. For the entire period almost 70 percent of all recorded court performances take place on these ten religious festivals. Prompted by such facts, Professor Hassel has investigated the correlations between these performances and the thematic, imagistic, and narrative facets of their recurrent festival occasions. The self-conscious appropriateness of many of the masques to the festival on which they were commissioned to be performed lends the strongest support to his argument. The frequent appearance of festival motifs in plays with festival titles like Twelfth Night and Michaelmas Terme strengthens it still further. That plays of purely secular genesis (Olde Fortunatus, Volpone, The Winter's Tale, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice) are also so frequently apposite to their liturgical occasion even suggests that some might have been selected for their appropriateness -- an inference reinforced by the testimony of two seventeenth-century witnesses to the general tradition, Griffin Higgs and The Stage Acquitted.
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 Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches written by Mary Désirée Anderson and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain written by Clifford Davidson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based in records and iconography, this book surveys medieval festival playing in Britain more comprehensively than any other work to date. The study presents an inclusive view of the drama in the British Isles, from Kilkenny to Great Yarmouth, from Scotland to Cornwall. It offers detailed readings of individual plays-including the York Creed Play, Pentecost and Corpus Christi plays and the little studied Bodley plays, among others - as well as a summary of what is known of their production. Clifford Davidson here extends the usual chronological range to include work typically categorized as early modern, enabling a juxtaposition of earlier plays with later plays to yield a better understanding of both. Complementing documentary evidence with iconographic detail and citation of music, he pinpoints a number of common misconceptions about medieval drama. By organizing the study around the rituals of the liturgical seasons, he clarifies the relationship between liturgical feast and dramatic celebration.
Download or read book On the Queerness of Early English Drama written by Tison Pugh and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book probes occluded depictions of queerness in early English drama, ranging from medieval morality plays to Reformation interludes and beyond.
Download or read book Heterodox Shakespeare written by Sean Benson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last quarter century has seen a “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies as well as competing assertions by secular critics that Shakespeare’s plays reflect profound skepticism and even dismissal of the truth claims of revealed religion. This divide, though real, obscures the fact that Shakespeare often embeds both readings within the same play. This book is the first to propose an accommodation between religious and secular readings of the plays. Benson argues that Shakespeare was neither a mere debunker of religious orthodoxies nor their unquestioning champion. Religious inquiry in his plays is capacious enough to explore religious orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, everything from radical belief and the need to tolerate religious dissent to the possibility of God’s nonexistence. Shakespeare’s willingness to explore all aspects of religious and secular life, often simultaneously, is a mark of his tremendous intellectual range. Taking the heterodox as his focus, Benson examines five figures and ideas on the margins of the post-Reformation English church: nonconforming puritans such as Malvolio as well as physical revenants—the walking dead—whom Shakespeare alludes to and features so tantalizingly in Hamlet. Benson applies what Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—his ability to treat both sides of an issue equally and without prejudice—to show that Shakespeare considers possible worlds where God is intimately involved in the lives of persons and, in the very same play, a world in which God may not even exist. Benson demonstrates both that the range of Shakespeare’s investigation of religious questions is more daring than has previously been thought, and that the distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the orthodox and the unorthodox, is one that Shakespeare continually engages.
