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 219 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 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 Globalizing Fortune on The Early Modern Stage written by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about the all-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency? Globalizing Fortune addresses these questions by demonstrating how English economic expansion and global transformation produced a new philosophy of fortune oriented around discerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities. The popular theater played an influential role in dramatizing the new prospects and dangers opened up by nascent global economics and fostering a set of ethical practices for engaging with fortunes unpredictable turns. While largely derided as a sinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune made a comeback on the English Renaissance stage as a force associated with valiant risks, ennobling adventures, and purposeful action. The early modern stage also reveals how a new philosophy of fortune led to economic exploitation and racialized exclusions. Offering in-depth discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the history of the English commercial theaterlike that of English seaborne expansionwas also a history of fortune. The public theater not only shaped popular understandings of fortunes role in a culture undergoing economic transformation, but also addressed this transformation from a unique position because of its own implication in London commerce, its reliance on paying customers, and its vulnerability to the risks and contingencies of live performance. Drawing attention to an archive of plays dramatizing maritime travel, trade, and adventure, this book shows how the popular stage shaped evolving understandings of fortune by cultivating new viewing practices and mechanisms of theatrical wonder, as well as modeling proper ways of acting in the face of unknown outcomes and contingency. In short, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the public theater offered the first modern understanding of fortune as a globalizing commercial and ethical phenomenon.
Download or read book Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse 1603 1625 written by Simon Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.
Download or read book Dramatic Geography written by Laurence Publicover and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on early modern plays which stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, the volume explores the ways in which early modern plays stage dramatic geography and how this has shaped literary and theatrical heritage.
Download or read book Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England written by Deutermann Allison Deutermann and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the impact of hearing on the formal and generic development of early modern theatreEarly modern drama was in fundamental ways an aural art form. How plays should sound, and how they should be heard, were vital questions to the formal development of early modern drama. Ultimately, they shaped the two of its most popular genres: revenge tragedy and city comedy. Simply put, theatregoers were taught to hear these plays differently. Revenge tragedies by Shakespeare and Kyd imagine sound stabbing, piercing, and slicing into listeners' bodies on and off the stage; while comedies by Jonson and Marston imagine it being sampled selectively, according to taste. Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England traces the dialectical development of these two genres and auditory modes over six decades of commercial theatre history, combining surveys of the theatrical marketplace with focused attention to specific plays and to the non-dramatic literature that gives this interest in audition texture: anatomy texts, sermons, music treatises, and manuals on rhetoric and poetics.Key Features Invites new attention to the theatre as something heard, rather than as something seen, in performanceProvides a model for understanding aesthetic forms as developing in competitive response to one another in particular historical circumstancesEnriches our sense of early modern playgoers' auditory experience, and of dramatists' attempt to shape it
Download or read book Christopher Marlowe in Context written by Emily C. Bartels and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A contemporary of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe was one of the most influential early modern dramatists, whose life and mysterious death have long been the subject of critical and popular speculation. This collection sets Marlowe's plays and poems in their historical context, exploring his world and his wider cultural influence. Chapters by leading international scholars discuss both his major and lesser-known works. Divided into three sections, 'Marlowe's works', 'Marlowe's world', and 'Marlowe's reception', the book ranges from Marlowe's relationship with his own audience through to adaptations of his plays for modern cinema. Other contexts for Marlowe include history and politics, religion and science. Discussions of Marlowe's critics and Marlowe's appeal today, in performance, literature and biography, show how and why his works continue to resonate; and a comprehensive further reading list provides helpful suggestions for those who want to find out more.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Audiences written by Matteo Pangallo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-28 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare wrote for a theater in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare’s audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms engaged with the performance of Shakespeare’s plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of Shakespeare's audiences and their relationship to performance? The chapters in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare’s audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare’s audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.
Download or read book Playing Indoors written by Will Tosh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What have we discovered about performance practice in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse since the opening of the intimate candlelit theatre at Shakespeare's Globe? Playing Indoors reveals the results of a two-year study into the performance of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in this unique theatre, drawing together insights into early modern stage practice and the observations of today's actors and spectators. A history of the experiences of artists and audience members who experienced the space first, the book is also a study of the significance of re-imagined theatres like the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and the Globe. Accessibly written and intended for a wide audience of students, scholars, artists and theatre-goers, Playing Indoors is a valuable contribution to the young field of early modern practice-as-research.
Download or read book Early Modern Spectatorship written by Ronald Huebert and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it mean to be a spectator during the lifetime of Shakespeare or of Aphra Behn? In Early Modern Spectatorship contributors use the idea of spectatorship to reinterpret canonical early modern texts and bring visibility to relatively unknown works. While many early modern spectacles were designed to influence those who watched, the very presence of spectators and their behaviour could alter the conduct and the meaning of the event itself. In the case of public executions, for example, audiences could both observe and be observed by the executioner and the condemned. Drawing on work in the digital humanities and theories of cultural spectacle, these essays discuss subjects as various as the death of Desdemona in Othello, John Donne's religious orientation, Ned Ward's descriptions of London, and Louis Laguerre's murals painted for the residences of English aristocrats. A lucid exploration of subtle questions, Early Modern Spectatorship identifies, imagines, and describes the spectator's experience in early modern culture.
Download or read book Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare s Theater written by Matteo A. Pangallo and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the dramatists who wrote for the professional playhouses of early modern London was a small group of writers who were neither members of the commercial theater industry writing to make a living nor aristocratic amateurs dipping their toes in theatrical waters for social or political prestige. Instead, they were largely working- and middle-class amateurs who had learned most of what they knew about drama from being members of the audience. Using a range of familiar and lesser-known print and manuscript plays, as well as literary accounts and documentary evidence, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater shows how these playgoers wrote and revised to address what they assumed to be the needs of actors, readers, and the Master of the Revels; how they understood playhouse materials and practices; and how they crafted poetry for theatrical effects. The book also situates them in the context of the period's concepts of, and attitudes toward, playgoers' participation in the activity of playmaking. Plays by playgoers such as the rogue East India Company clerk Walter Mountfort or the highwayman John Clavell invite us into the creative imaginations of spectators, revealing what certain audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. By reading Shakespeare's theater through these playgoers' works, Matteo Pangallo contributes a new category of evidence to our understanding of the relationships between the early modern stage, its plays, and its audiences. More broadly, he shows how the rise of England's first commercialized culture industry also gave rise to the first generation of participatory consumers and their attempts to engage with mainstream culture by writing early modern "fan fiction."
Download or read book Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama written by Noam Reisner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-30 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of how Renaissance English revenge drama carried out important ethical work through audience participation and metatheatre.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Power of the Face written by James A. Knapp and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare’s England helps explain moments when Shakespeare’s language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare’s treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing interpretation and production of the plays. Engaging with a variety of critical strands that have emerged from the so-called turn to the body, the contributors to this volume argue that Shakespeare’s invitation to look to the face for clues to inner character is not an invitation to seek a static text beneath an external image, but rather to experience the power of the face to initiate reflection, judgment, and action. The evidence of the plays suggests that Shakespeare understood that this experience was extremely complex and mysterious. By turning attention to the face, the collection offers important new analyses of a key feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic attention to the part of the body that garnered the most commentary in early modern England. By bringing together critics interested in material culture studies with those focused on philosophies of self and other and historians and theorists of performance, Shakespeare and the Power of the Face constitutes a significant contribution to our growing understanding of attitudes towards embodiment in Shakespeare’s England.
Download or read book Shakespearean Sensations written by Katharine A. Craik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespearean Sensations explores the ways Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined literature affecting audiences' bodies, minds and emotions.
Download or read book Who Hears in Shakespeare written by Laury Magnus and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, examining the ways in which Shakespeare's plays are designed for hearers as well as spectators, has been prompted by recent explorations of the auditory dimension of early modern drama by such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Bruce Smith, and James Hirsh. To look at the dynamics of hearing in Shakespeare's plays involves a paradigm shift that changes how we understand virtually everything about them, from the architecture of the buildings, to playing spaces, to blocking, and to larger interpretative issues, including our understanding of character based on players' responses to what they hear, mishear, or refuse to hear. Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stage and Screen is comprised of three sections on Shakespeare's texts and performance history: "The Poetics of Hearing and the Early Modern Stage"; "Metahearing: Hearing, Knowing, and Audiences, Onstage and Off"; and "Transhearing: Hearing, Whispering, Overhearing, and Eavesdropping in Film and Other Media." Chapters by noted scholars explore the complex reactions and interactions of onstage and offstage audiences and show how Shakespearean stagecraft, actualized on stage and adapted on screen, revolves around various situations and conventions of hearing--soliloquies, asides, avesdropping, overhearing, and stage whispers. In short, Who Hears in Shakespeare? enunciates Shakespeare's nuanced, powerful stagecraft of hearing. The volume ends with Stephen Booth's afterword, his inspiring meditation on hearing that considers Shakespearean "audiences" and their responses to what they hear--or don't hear--in Shakespeare's plays.
Download or read book Thomas Middleton in Context written by Suzanne Gossett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-21 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating study of all works in the newly enlarged Middleton canon, placing them in personal, national, international and theatrical contexts.
Download or read book Richard III written by Annaliese Connolly and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing key themes and the history of the play's performance and critical reception, this is a comprehensive guide to Richard III by leading international scholars.
