Download or read book Living Death in Early Modern Drama written by James Alsop and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-31 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores historical, socio-political, and metatheatrical readings of a whole host of dying bodies and risen corpses, each part of a long tradition of living death on stage. Just as zombies, ghouls, and the undead in modern media often stand in for present-day concerns, early modern writers frequently imagined living death in complex ways that allowed them to address contemporary anxieties. These include fresh bleeding bodies (and body parts), ghostly Lord Mayors, and dying characters who must carefully choose their last words – or have those words chosen for them by the living. As well as offering fresh interpretations of well-known plays such as Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy and Webster’s The White Devil, this innovative study also sheds light on less well-known works such as the anonymous The Tragedy of Locrine, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Munday’s mayoral pageants Chruso-thriambos and Chrysanaleia. The author demonstrates that wherever characters in early modern drama appear to straddle the line between this world and the next, it is rarely a simple matter of life and death. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in theatre and performance studies, and cultural and social studies.

Download or read book Living Death in Early Modern Drama written by James Alsop (Independent researcher) and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book explores historical, socio-political and metatheatrical readings of a whole host of dying bodies and risen corpses, each part of a long tradition of living death on stage. Just as zombies, ghouls, and the undead in modern media often stand for present-day concerns, early modern writers frequently imagined living death in complex ways that allowed them to address contemporary anxieties. These include fresh bleeding bodies (and body parts), ghostly Lord Mayors, and dying characters who must carefully choose their last words - or have those words chosen for them by the living. As well as offering fresh interpretations of well-known plays such as Middleton's 'The Lady's Tragedy' and Webster's 'The White Devil', this innovative study also sheds light on less well-known works such as the an-nymous 'The Tragedy of Locrine', Marston's 'Antonio's Revenge' and Munday's mayoral pageants 'Chruso-thriambos' and 'Chrysanaleia'. The author demonstrates that wherever characters in early modern drama appear to straddle the line between this world and the next, it is rarely a simple matter of life and death. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in theatre and performance studies, and cultural and social studies"--

Download or read book Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare s Theatre written by Susan Zimmerman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, psychoanalysis and anthropology, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the 'dead' in early modern English culture.Susan Zimmerman argues that concepts of the corpse as a semi-animate, generative and indeterminate entity were deeply rooted in medieval religious culture. Such concepts ran counter to early modern discourses that sought to harden categorical distinctions between body/spirit, animate/inanimate - in particular, the attacks of Reformists on the materiality of 'dead' idols, and the rationale of the new anatomy for publicly dissecting 'dead' bodies. Zimmerman contends that within this context, theatrical representations of the corpse or corpse/revenant - as seen here in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries - uniquely showcased the theatre's own ideological and performative agency. Features*Original in its conjunction of critical theory (Bataille, Kristeva, Lacan, Benjamin) with an historical account of the shifting status of the corpse in late medieval and early modern England.*The first study to demonstrate connections between the meanings attached to the material body in early modern Protestantism, the practice of anatomical dissection, and the English public theatre.*Strong market appeal to scholars and graduate students with interests in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern religion and science, and literary theory. *Relevant to advanced undergraduates taking widely taught courses in Shakespeare and in Renaissance drama.

Download or read book Last Acts written by Maggie Vinter and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last Acts argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Psychoanalytic and new historicist scholars have exhaustively documented the methods that early modern dramatic texts and performances use to memorialize the dead, at times even asserting that theater itself constitutes a form of mourning. But early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grief than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie narratives of helplessness and loss through which mortality is too often read and instead suggest how marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some early modern strategies for dying resonate with descriptions of politicized biological life in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, or with ecclesiastical forms. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, alongside devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

Download or read book Playing Dead written by James Alsop (fl. 2014) and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Playing Dead written by James Alsop and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Death in modern theatre written by Adrian Curtin and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses representations of death and dying in modern Western theatre from the late nineteenth century onward, examining how and why historically informed conceptions of mortality are dramatized and staged.

Download or read book Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama written by Andrew Griffin and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades before history was institutionalized as a scholarly discipline, historical writing was practiced variously by poets, record keepers, lawyers, sermonizers, mythologizers, and philosophers. In this welter of competing forms of historical thought, early modern drama often operated as a site in which claims about the nature of historical change could be treated in a frequently conflicting manner. To explore this arena of competing forms of historical explanation, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama focuses on the problem of narrative abruption in a selection of historically minded early modern plays as they rely on various strategies to make sense of biography and fatality. Arguing that narrative forms fail in the face of untimely death, Andrew Griffin shows that the disruption appears as a matter of trauma, making the untimely death both a point of narrative conflict and a social problem. Exploring the formula that early modern dramatists used to make sense of life and death, this book draws on the wider context of this period's culture of historical writing.

Download or read book Second Death written by Donovan Sherman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second Death seeks to revitalise our understanding of the soul as a philosophically profound, theoretically radical, and ultimately-and counterintuitively-theatrically realised concept. The book contends that the work of Shakespeare, when closely read alongside early modern cultural and religious writings, helps us understand the soul's historical placement as a powerful paradox: it was essential to establishing humanity but resistant to clear representation. Drawing from current critical theory as well as extensive historical research, Second Death examines works of Shakespearean drama, including The Merchant of Venice, Coriolanus, and The Winter's Tale, to suggest that rather than simply being incapable of understanding or physical realisation, the soul expressed itself in complex and subtle modes of performance. As a result, this book offers new ways of looking at identity, theatre, and spirituality in Shakespeare's era and in our own.

Download or read book Last Acts written by Maggie Vinter and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death. The book analyzes representations of dying in plays by writers including Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson, alongside devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory.

Download or read book Issues of Death written by Michael Neill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death, like most experiences that we think of as natural, is a product of the human imagination: all animals die, but only human beings suffer Death; and what they suffer is shaped by their own time and culture. Tragedy was one of the principal instruments through which the culture of early modern England imagined the encounter with mortality. The essays in this book approach the theatrical reinvention of Death from three perspectives. Those in Part I explore Death as a trope of apocalypse — a moment of un-veiling or dis-covery that is figured both in the fearful nakedness of the Danse Macabre and in the shameful openings enacted in the new theatres of anatomy. Separate chapters explore the apocalyptic design of two of the periods most powerful tragedies — Shakespeare's Othello, and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. In Part 2, Neill explores the psychological and affective consequences of tragedy's fiercely end-driven narrative in a number of plays where a longing for narrative closure is pitched against a particularly intense dread of ending. The imposition of an end is often figured as an act of writerly violence, committed by the author or his dramatic surrogate. Extensive attention is paid to Hamlet as an extreme example of the structural consequences of such anxiety. The function of revenge tragedy as a response to the radical displacement of the dead by the Protestant abolition of purgatory — one of the most painful aspects of the early modern re-imagining of death — is also illustrated with particular clarity. Finally, Part 3 focuses on the way tragedy articulates its challenge to the undifferentiating power of death through conventions and motifs borrowed from the funereal arts. It offers detailed analyses of three plays — Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Ford's The Broken Heart. Here, funeral is rewritten as triumph, and death becomes the chosen instrument of an heroic self-fashioning designed to dress the arbitrary abruption of mortal ending in a powerful aesthetic of closure.

Download or read book Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman written by Lucinda M. Becker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the female experience of death in early modern England. By tracing attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, it advances our understanding of the construction of femininity in the period. Becker illustrates how dying could be a positive event for a woman, and for her mourners, in terms of how it allowed her to be defined, enabled and elevated. The first part of the book gives a cultural and historical overview of death in early modern England, examining the means by which human mortality was confronted, and how the fear of death and dying could be used to uphold the mores of society. Becker explores particularly the female experience of death, and how women used the deathbed as a place of power from which to bestow dying maternal blessings, or leave instructions and advice for their survivors. The second part of the study looks at 'good' and 'bad' female deaths. The author discusses the motivation behind the reporting of the deaths and the veracity of such accounts, and highlights the ways in which they could be used for religious, political and patriarchal purposes. The third section of the book considers how death could, paradoxically, liberate a woman. In this section Becker evaluates the opportunity for female involvement in dying and posthumous rituals, including funeral rites and sermons, commemorative and autobiographical writing and literary legacies. While accounts of dying women largely underpinned the existing patriarchy, the experience of dying allowed some women to express themselves by allowing them to utilise an established male discourse. This opportunity for expression, along with the power of the deathbed, are the focus for this study.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Afterlife written by John S. Garrison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of what happens after death was a vital one in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Early moderns held surprisingly diverse beliefs about the afterlife and about how earthly life affected one's fate after death. Was death akin to a sleep where one did not wake until judgment day? Were sick bodies healed in heaven? Did sinners experience torment after death? Would an individual reunite with loved ones in the afterlife? Could the dead communicate with the world of the living? Could the living affect the state of souls after death? How should the dead be commemorated? Could the dead return to life? Was immortality possible? The wide array of possible answers to these questions across Shakespeare's work can be surprising. Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living. Shakespeare and the Afterlife encourages us to engage with the author's work with new insight and new curiosity. The volume connects some of the best-known speeches, characters, and conflicts to cultural debates and traditions circulating during Shakespeare's time.

Download or read book The Shakespearean Death Arts written by William E. Engel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to view Shakespeare’s plays from the prospect of the premodern death arts, not only the ars moriendi tradition but also the plurality of cultural expressions of memento mori, funeral rituals, commemorative activities, and rhetorical techniques and strategies fundamental to the performance of the work of dying, death, and the dead. The volume is divided into two sections: first, critically nuanced examinations of Shakespeare’s corpus and then, second, of Hamlet exclusively as the ultimate proving ground of the death arts in practice. This book revitalizes discussion around key and enduring themes of mortality by reframing Shakespeare’s plays within a newly conceptualized historical category that posits a cultural divide—at once epistemological and phenomenological—between premodernity and the Enlightenment.

Download or read book Representing the Plague in Early Modern England written by Rebecca Totaro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life.

Download or read book Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage written by Asuka Kimura and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-01-30 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

Download or read book Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton written by Thomas Page Anderson and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of political and cultural acts of commemoration, this study addresses the connection of representation of violence in literary works to historical traumas such as royal death, secularization and regicide. Incorporating contemporary theories of trauma, Thomas Anderson here analyzes works by Shakepeare, Marlowe, Webster, Marvell and Milton. By interrogating the difficulty in representing historical crises in poetry, drama and political prose, Anderson demonstrates how early modern English identity is the fragile product of an ambivalent desire to flee history.