Download or read book The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London written by I. Munro and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-04-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London examines the cultural phenomenon of the urban crowd in the context of early modern London's population crisis. The book explores the crowd's double function as a symbol of the city's growth and as the necessary context for the public performance of urban culture. Its central argument is that the figure of the crowd acts as a supplement to the symbolic space of the city, at once providing a tangible referent for urban meaning and threatening the legibility of that meaning through its motive force and uncontrollable energy.

Download or read book Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England written by Tara E. Pedersen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We no longer ascribe the term ’mermaid’ to those we deem sexually or economically threatening; we do not ubiquitously use the mermaid’s image in political propaganda or feature her within our houses of worship; perhaps most notably, we do not entertain the possibility of the mermaid’s existence. This, author Tara Pedersen argues, makes it difficult for contemporary scholars to consider the mermaid as a figure who wields much social significance. During the early modern period, however, this was not the case, and Pedersen illustrates the complicated category distinctions that the mermaid inhabits and challenges in 16th-and 17th-century England. Addressing epistemological questions about embodiment and perception, this study furthers research about early modern theatrical culture by focusing on under-theorized and seldom acknowledged representations of mermaids in English locations and texts. While individuals in early modern England were under pressure to conform to seemingly monolithic ideals about the natural order, there were also significant challenges to this order. Pedersen uses the figure of the mermaid to rethink some of these challenges, for the mermaid often appears in surprising places; she is situated at the nexus of historically specific debates about gender, sexuality, religion, the marketplace, the new science, and the culture of curiosity and travel. Although these topics of inquiry are not new, Pedersen argues that the mermaid provides a new lens through which to look at these subjects and also helps scholars think about the present moment, methodologies of reading, and many category distinctions that are important to contemporary scholarly debates.

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 Writing Early Modern London written by A. Gordon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Early Modern London explores how urban community in London was experienced, imagined and translated into textual form. Ranging from previously unstudied manuscripts to major works by Middleton, Stow and Whitney, it examines how memory became a key cultural battleground as rites of community were appropriated in creative ways.

Download or read book Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England written by Jennifer C. Vaught and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England explores the elite and popular festive materials appropriated by authors during the English Renaissance in a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts. Although historical records of rural, urban, and courtly seasonal customs in early modern England exist only in fragmentary form, Jennifer Vaught traces the sustained impact of festivals and rituals on the plays and poetry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers. She focuses on the diverse ways in which Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Milton and Herrick incorporated the carnivalesque in their works. Further, she demonstrates how these early modern texts were used-and misused-by later writers, performers, and inventors of spectacles, notably Mardi Gras krewes organizing parades in the American Deep South. The works featured here often highlight violent conflicts between individuals of different ranks, ethnicities, and religions, which the author argues reflect the social realities of the time. These Renaissance writers responded to republican, egalitarian notions of liberty for the populace with radical support, ambivalence, or conservative opposition. Ultimately, the vital, folkloric dimension of these plays and poems challenges the notion that canonical works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries belong only to 'high' and not to 'low' culture.

Download or read book Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England written by S. P. Cerasano and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE DRAMA IN ENGLAND, now over twenty years in publication, is an international journal committed to the publication of essays and reviews relevant to drama and theatre history to 1642. MaRDiE 23 features essays by MacDonald P. Jackson on authorship as related to Shakespeare, Kyd, and Arden of Faversham. James Hirsh considers the editing of Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be' in light of both conventional and emerging editorial theory. Politics and prophecy, as they influence Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is at the centre of Brian Walsh's contribution, while John Curran uses declamation as a rhetorical strategy in order to focus on character in the Fletcher-Massinger plays. Chris Fitter considers vagrancy and 'vestry values' in Shakespeare's As You Like It and June Schlueter reconsiders the matter of theatrical cartography and The View of London from the North. The collection of reviews range from books on early modern dietaries and Shakespeare's plays to those on male friendship and theatre economics.

Download or read book Publicity and the Early Modern Stage written by Allison K. Deutermann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity’s production. The men and women associated with playing—not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions—introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.

Download or read book Local Identities in Late Medieval and Early Modern England written by Daniel Woolf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-10-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the path-breaking work of Robert Tittler, the authors explore late Medieval and Early Modern community and identity across England. They examine the decline of neighbourliness, the politics of market towns, clerical status, charity, crime, and ways in which overlapping communities of court and country, London and Lancashire, relate.

Download or read book Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England written by Alison V. Scott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ’luxury’ could and often did denote merely ’lust’ or ’licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ’luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture.

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 2022-08-25 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 theall-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 arounddiscerning 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 asinful, 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 toeconomic 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 popularunderstandings 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 liveperformance. 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 actingin 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 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 Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre written by Richard Preiss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Preiss presents a lively and provocative study of how the ever-popular stage clown shaped early modern playhouse theatre.

Download or read book Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare written by Kai Wiegandt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, the author offers new interpretations of Shakespeare's works in the context of two major contemporary notions of collectivity: the crowd and rumour. The plays illustrate that rumour and crowd are mutually dependent; they also betray a fascination with the fact that crowd and rumour make individuality disappear. Shakespeare dramatizes these mechanisms, relating the crowd to class conflict, to rhetoric, to the theatre and to the organization of the state; and linking rumour to fear, to fame and to philosophical doubt. Paying attention to all levels of collectivity, Wiegandt emphasizes the close relationship between the crowd onstage and the Elizabethan audience. He argues that there was a significant - and sometimes precarious - metatheatrical blurring between the crowd on the stage and the crowd around the stage in performances of crowd scenes. The book's focus on crowd and rumour provides fresh insights on the central problems of some of Shakespeare's most contentiously debated plays, and offers an alternative to the dominant tradition of celebrating Shakespeare as the origin of modern individualism.

Download or read book The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies Volume II written by P. Cefalu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion volume to The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive exemplifies the new directions in which the field is going as well as the value of crossing disciplinary boundaries within and beyond the humanities. Topics studied include posthumanism, ecological studies, and historical phenomenology.

Download or read book St Paul s Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture written by Roze Hentschell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the 1666 fire of London, St Paul's Cathedral was an important central site for religious, commercial, and social life in London. The literature of the period - both fictional and historical - reveals a great interest in the space, and show it to be complex and contested, with multiple functions and uses beyond its status as a church. St Paul's Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Spatial Practices animates the cathedral space by focusing on the every day functions of the building, deepening and sometimes complicating previous works on St Paul's. St Paul's Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture is a study of London's cathedral, its immediate surroundings, and its everyday users in early modern literary and historical documents and images, with special emphasis on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It discusses representations of several of the seemingly discrete spaces of the precinct to reveal how these spaces overlap with and inform one another spatially, and argues that specific locations should be seen as mutually constitutive and in a dynamic and ever-evolving state. The varied uses of the precinct, including the embodied spatial practices of early modern Londoners and visitors, are examined, including the walkers in the nave, sermon-goers, those who shopped for books, the residents of the precinct, the choristers, and those who were devoted to church repairs and renovations.

Download or read book News in Early Modern Europe written by Simon Davies and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-07-07 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: News in Early Modern Europe presents new research on the nature, production, and dissemination of a variety of forms of news writing from across Europe during the early modern period.

Download or read book Dissecting the Criminal Corpse written by Elizabeth T. Hurren and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Those convicted of homicide were hanged on the public gallows before being dissected under the Murder Act in Georgian England. Yet, from 1752, whether criminals actually died on the hanging tree or in the dissection room remained a medical mystery in early modern society. Dissecting the Criminal Corpse takes issue with the historical cliché of corpses dangling from the hangman’s rope in crime studies. Some convicted murderers did survive execution in early modern England. Establishing medical death in the heart-lungs-brain was a physical enigma. Criminals had large bull-necks, strong willpowers, and hearty survival instincts. Extreme hypothermia often disguised coma in a prisoner hanged in the winter cold. The youngest and fittest were capable of reviving on the dissection table. Many died under the lancet. Capital legislation disguised a complex medical choreography that surgeons staged. They broke the Hippocratic Oath by executing the Dangerous Dead across England from 1752 until 1832. This book is open access under a CC-BY license.