Download or read book Lighting the Shakespearean Stage 1567 1642 written by R. B. Graves and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1999-12-08 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642,R. B. Graves examines the lighting of early modern English drama from both historical and aesthetic perspectives. He traces the contrasting traditions of sunlit amphitheaters and candlelit hall playhouses, describes the different lighting techniques, and estimates the effect of these techniques both indoors and outdoors. Graves discusses the importance of stage lighting in determining the dramatic effect, even in cases where the manipulation of light was not under the direct control of the theater artists. He devotes a chapter to the early modern lighting equipment available to English Renaissance actors and surveys theatrical lighting before the construction of permanent playhouses in London. Elizabethan stage lighting, he argues, drew on both classical and medieval precedents.
Download or read book The Shakespearean Stage 1574 1642 written by Andrew Gurr and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost forty years The Shakespearean Stage has been considered the liveliest, most reliable and most entertaining overview of Shakespearean theatre in its own time. It is the only authoritative book that describes all the main features of the original staging of Shakespearean drama in one volume: the acting companies and their practices, the playhouses, the staging and the audiences. Thoroughly revised and updated, this fourth edition contains fresh materials about how specific plays by Shakespeare were first staged, and provides new information about the companies that staged them and their playhouses. The book incorporates everything that has been discovered in recent years about the early modern stage, including the archaeology of the Rose and the Globe. Also included is an invaluable appendix, listing all the plays known to have been performed at particular playhouses and by specific companies.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Original Stage Conditions and their Afterlives across the Globe written by Yu Jin Ko and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Visualising Lost Theatres written by Joanne Tompkins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering study harnesses virtual reality to uncover the history of five venues that have been 'lost' to us: London's 1590s Rose Theatre; Bergen's mid-nineteenth-century Komediehuset; Adelaide's Queen's Theatre of 1841; circus tents hosting Cantonese opera performances in Australia's goldfields in the 1850s; and the Stardust showroom in 1950s Las Vegas. Shaping some of the most enduring genres of world theatre and cultural production, each venue marks a significant cultural transformation, charted here through detailed discussion of theatrical praxis and socio-political history. Using virtual models as performance laboratories for research, Visualising Lost Theatres recreates the immersive feel of venues and reveals performance logistics for actors and audiences. Proposing a new methodology for using visualisations as a tool in theatre history, and providing 3D visualisations for the reader to consult alongside the text, this is a landmark contribution to the digital humanities.
Download or read book Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare written by Jonathan Gil Harris and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing? In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time—the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel—the explosive, world-changing potential—back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.
Download or read book The Shakespeare Company 1594 1642 written by Andrew Gurr and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-15 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first complete history of the theater company in which Shakespeare acted and which staged all his plays. Created in 1594, the company became the King's Men in 1603 and ran for forty-eight years up to the closure of 1642. Andrew Gurr provides a study of the company's activities, explores its social role in its time and examines its repertoire of plays. This comprehensive illustrated history will be an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to know more about the conditions under which Shakespeare and his successors worked.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Double Plays written by Brett Gamboa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first comprehensive study of how Shakespeare designed his plays to suit his playing company, Brett Gamboa demonstrates how Shakespeare turned his limitations to creative advantage, and how doubling roles suited his unique sense of the dramatic. By attending closely to their dramaturgical structures, Gamboa analyses casting requirements for the plays Shakespeare wrote for the company between 1594 and 1610, and describes how using the embedded casting patterns can enhance their thematic and theatrical potential. Drawing on historical records, dramatic theory, and contemporary performance this innovative work questions received ideas about early modern staging and provides scholars and contemporary theatre practitioners with a valuable guide to understanding how casting can help facilitate audience engagement. Supported by an appendix of speculative doubling charts for plays, illustrations, and online resources, this is a major contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare's dramatic craft.
Download or read book Staging and Stage D cor Perspectives on European Theater 1500 1950 written by Bárbara Mujica and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Staging and Stage Décor: Perspectives on European Theater 1500-1950' is a compendium of essays by an international array of theater specialists. The Introduction provides an overview of theater décor and architecture from ancient Greece through the Renaissance and beyond, while the articles that follow explore a variety of topics such as the development of lighting techniques in early modern Italy, the staging of convent theater in Portugal, performance spaces at Versailles, the reconstruction of the Globe theater, and Shrovetide plays in Germany. This volume also offers insight into little-studied subjects such as the early productions of Brecht and the spread of Russian theater to Japan. The focus on performance and performance space across centuries and continents makes this a truly unique volume.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare written by Arthur F. Kinney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 846 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains forty original essays.
Download or read book Speaking Pictures written by Virginia Mason Vaughan and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking Pictures explores the complex negotiations between seeing and hearing essential to the audiences' experience in any dramatic performance. Ranging chronologically from the Middle Ages to the present, the essays consider a variety of methods that help us recuperate the visual impact of theatrical spectacle before the age of video archives. The anthology takes its discussion of performance beyond the physical space of the theater to examine texts that were meant to be spoken but not literally performed, such as medieval pageantry and closet dramas of the nineteenth century. Many essays focus on the Early Modern English stage, particularly the challenges of recapturing the totality of the original audience's experience in London's open air theaters by the examination of stage directions, text, and archival evidence. The collection concludes with a discussion of the contemporary actor's challenge in physicalizing the language of Early Modern plays, especially Shakespeare's
Download or read book Colour Studies written by Wendy Anderson and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-11-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents some of the latest research in colour studies by specialists across a wide range of academic disciplines. Many are represented here, including anthropology, archaeology, the fine arts, linguistics, onomastics, philosophy, psychology and vision science. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at the Progress in Colour Studies (PICS12) conference held at the University of Glasgow. Papers from the earlier PICS04 and PICS08 conferences were published by John Benjamins as Progress in Colour Studies, 2 volumes, 2006 and New Directions in Colour Studies, 2011, respectively. The opening chapter of this new volume stems from the conference keynote talk on prehistoric colour semantics by Carole P. Biggam. The remaining chapters are grouped into three sections: colour and linguistics; colour categorization, naming and preference; and colour and the world. Each section is preceded by a short preface drawing together the themes of the chapters within it. There are thirty-one colour illustrations.
Download or read book Theory for Theatre Studies Light written by Dean Wilcox and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What properties of light can be manipulated for aesthetic effect? What role does the perception of the audience play in how stage information is received and processed? How do changes in technology affect methods or approaches to design and practice? This book is designed to introduce key ideas about light and to generate questions and perspectives that will encourage readers to explore light in the theatre more fully in their own critical and creative practices. Examining the theories behind stage lighting practice to help students learn to analyse the aesthetic and critical impacts of light in performance, this book traces the development of lighting practice by focusing on important shifts in technology and aesthetics from the classical period to the modern era. Central to this study are ideas developed by 'New Stagecraft' theorists and designers Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig and Robert Edmond Jones. Case studies include semiotic approaches to Loïe Fuller's combination of light, movement and costume, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach and Tadashi Suzuki's The Trojan Women. Further case studies including the installation work of James Turrell and Refik Anadol, the Winston Salem Light Project and David Byrne's American Utopia, examine the use of light in theatrical and non-theatrical spaces by focusing on phenomenology, community engagement and the evolution of lighting technology. A companion website features links to images, chapter summaries, questions and further resources for study.
Download or read book Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater written by Lauren Robertson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lauren Robertson's original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater's representational practices, Robertson uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of playgoing experience in this period. Doubt was not merely the purview of Hamlet and other onstage characters, but was in fact constitutive of spectators' imaginative participation in performance. Within a culture in the midst of extreme epistemological upheaval, the commercial theater licensed spectators' suspension among opposed possibilities, transforming dubiety itself into exuberantly enjoyable, spectacular show. Robertson shows that the playhouse was a site for the entertainment of uncertainty in a double sense: its pleasures made the very trial of unknowing possible.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III written by Philip Schwyzer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how recollections and traces of the reign of Richard III survived a century and more to influence the world and work of William Shakespeare. In Richard III, Shakespeare depicts an era that had only recently passed beyond the horizon of living memory. The years between Shakespeare's birth in 1564 and the composition of the play in the early 1590s would have seen the deaths of the last witnesses to Richard's reign. Yet even after the extinction of memory, traces of the Yorkist era abounded in Elizabethan England - traces in the forms of material artefacts and buildings, popular traditions, textual records, and administrative and religious institutions and practices. Other traces had notoriously disappeared, not least the bodies of the princes reputedly murdered in the Tower, and the King's own body, which remained lost until its dramatic rediscovery in the summer of 2012. Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III charts the often complex careers of these pieces of the past over the course of a century framed on one side by the historical reign of Richard III (1483-85) and on the other by Shakespeare's play. Drawing on recent work in fields including archaeology, memory studies, and material biography, this book offers a fresh approach to the cultural history of the Tudor era, as well as a fundamentally new interpretation of the wellsprings and preoccupations of Richard III. The final emphasis is not only on what Shakespeare does with the traces of Richard's reign but also on what those traces do through Shakespeare—the play, in spite of its own pessimistic assumptions about history, has become the medium whereby certain fragments and remains of a long-lost world live on into the present day.
Download or read book Negotiating Shakespeare s Language in Romeo and Juliet written by Lynette Hunter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-17 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through exciting and unconventional approaches, including critical/historical, printing/publishing and performance studies, this study mines Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to produce new insights into the early modern family, the individual, and society in the context of early modern capitalism. Inspired by recent work in cultural materialism and the material book, it also foregrounds the ways in which the contexts and the text itself become available to the reader today. The opening material on critical/historical approaches focuses on the way that readers have frequently read and played the text to explore issues that cluster around the family, marriage, gender and sexuality. Chapter two, on the ways that actors today inhabit character and create behaviour, provides intertextual comment on acting in the early modern period, and the connections between acting and social behaviour that inform self-image and the performance of identity both then and now. The third chapter on printing/publishing approaches to the text offers a detective story about the differences between Quarto One and Quarto Two, that focuses on the curious appearance in Quarto Two of material related to the law at word, phrase, line and scene level. The next three chapters integrate a close study of the language of the play to negotiate its potential significance for the present in the areas of: Family, Marriage, Gender and Sexuality; Identity, Individualism and Humanism; and the Law, Religion and Medicine. Among the startling aspects of this book are that it: - takes the part of Juliet far more seriously than other criticism has tended to do, attributing to her agency and aspects of character that develop the part suddenly from girl to woman; - recognizes the way the play explores early modern identity, becoming a handbook for individualism and humanism in the private domestic setting of early capitalism; and - brings to light the least recognized element in the play at the moment, its demonstration of the emerging structures of state power, governance by law, the introduction of surveillance, detection and witness, and the formation of what we now call the 'subject'. The volume includes on DVD a scholarly edition with commentary of the text of Romeo & Juliet, which re-instates many of the original early modern versions of the play.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Visual Theatre written by Frederick Kiefer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-25 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of Shakespeare's visual culture Frederick Kiefer looks at the personified characters created by Shakespeare in his plays, his walking, talking abstractions. These include Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter's Tale, Spring and Winter in Love's Labour's Lost, Revenge in Titus Andronicus, and the deities in the late plays. All these personae take physical form on the stage: the actors performing the roles wear distinctive attire and carry appropriate props. The book seeks to reconstruct the appearance of Shakespeare's personified characters; to explain the symbolism of their costumes and props; and to assess the significance of these symbolic characters for the plays in which they appear. To accomplish this reconstruction, Kiefer brings together a wealth of visual and literary evidence including engravings, woodcuts, paintings, drawings, tapestries, emblems, civic pageants, masques, poetry and plays. The book contains over forty illustrations of personified characters in Shakespeare's time.
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.
