Download or read book The Narrator the Expositor and the Prompter in European Medieval Theatre written by Philip Butterworth and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the role of the prompter who operated in full view of the audience and offered all the lines to the players. Such a role and its function is fascinating, not only in its own right, but also in relation to how it might inform us about the nature and purpose of presented theatre.
Download or read book Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre written by Philip Butterworth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was medieval English theatre performed? Many of the modern theatrical concepts and terms used today to discuss the nature of medieval English theatre were never used in medieval times. Concepts and terms such as character, characterisation, truth and belief, costume, acting style, amateur, professional, stage directions, effects and special effects are all examples of post-medieval terms that have been applied to the English theatre. Little has been written about staging conventions in the performance of medieval English theatre and the identity and value of these conventions has often been overlooked. In this book, Philip Butterworth analyses dormant evidence of theatrical processes such as casting, doubling of parts, rehearsing, memorising, cueing, entering, exiting, playing, expounding, prompting, delivering effects, timing, hearing, seeing and responding. All these concerns point to a very different kind of theatre to the naturalistic theatre produced today.
Download or read book Functions of Medieval English Stage Directions written by Philip Butterworth and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we speak of theatre, we think we know what a stage direction is: we tend to think of it as an authorial requirement, devised to be complementary to the spoken text and directed at those who put on a play as to what, when, where, how or why a moment, action or its staging should be completed. This is the general understanding to condition a theatrical convention known as the 'stage direction'. As such, we recognise that the stage direction is directed towards actors, directors, designers, and any others who have a part to play in the practical realisation of the play. And perhaps we think that this has always been the case. However, the term 'stage direction' is not a medieval one, nor does an English medieval equivalent term exist to codify the functions contained in extraneous manuscript notes, requirements, directions or records. The medieval English stage direction does not generally function in this way: it mainly exists as an observed record of earlier performance. There are examples of other functions, but even they are not directed at players or those involved in creating performance. More than 2000 stage directions from 40 or so plays and cycles have been included in the catalogue of the volume, and over 400 of those have been selected for analysis throughout the work. The purpose of this research is to examine the theatrical functions of medieval English stage directions as records of earlier performance. Examples of such functions are largely taken from outdoor scriptural plays. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, medieval history and literature.
Download or read book Staging Contemplation written by Eleanor Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-17 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics. Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor Johnson argues instead for the pervasiveness and accessibility of contemplative works to medieval audiences. By drawing together ostensibly diverse literary genres—devotional prose, allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays—Staging Contemplation paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world. Johnson further argues that the contemplative genre played a crucial role in the exploration of the English vernacular as a literary and theological language in the fifteenth century, tracing how these works engaged modes of disfluency—from strained syntax and aberrant grammar, to puns, slang, code-switching, and laughter—to explore the limits, norms, and potential of English as a devotional language. Full of virtuoso close readings, this book demonstrates a sustained interest in how poetic language can foster a participatory experience of likeness to God among lay and devotional audiences alike.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval written by Lindsay Ann Reid and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet.
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance written by Pamela King and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of early drama has undergone a quiet revolution in the last four decades, radically altering critical approaches to form, genre, and canon. Drawing on disciplines from art history to musicology and reception studies, The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance reconsiders early "drama" as a mixed mode entertainment best studied not only alongside non-dramatic texts, but also other modes of performance. From performance before the playhouse to the afterlife of medieval drama in the contemporary avant-garde, this stunning collection of essays is divided into four sections: Northern European Playing before the Playhouse; Modes of Production and Reception; Reviewing the Anglophone Tradition; The Long Middle Ages Offering a much needed reassessment of what is generally understood as "English medieval drama", The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance provides an invaluable resource for both students and scholars of medieval studies.
Download or read book Staging Vice written by Charlotte Steenbrugge and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Characters representing various sins and vices became the stars of their respective theatrical traditions in the course of the late medieval and early modern period in both the Low Countries and England. This study assesses the importance of such characters, and especially the English Vice and Dutch sinnekens, for our understanding of medieval and sixteenth-century Dutch and English drama by charting diachronic developments and through synchronic comparisons. The analysis of the functions as well as theatrical and meta-theatrical aspects of these characters reveals how these plays were conditioned by their literary and social setting. It sheds invaluable light on the subtly divergent appreciation of the concept of drama in these two regions and on their different use of drama as a didactic tool. In a wider perspective this study also investigates how the moral plays and their negative characters reflect the changes in the intellectual and religious climate of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Download or read book The Practicalities of Early English Performance Manuscripts Records and Staging written by Peter Meredith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected Studies CS1069 The essays selected for this volume reflect Peter Meredith’s major contribution to the revival and revision of academic and public interest in medieval English drama and theatre. A number of coinciding factors in the last quarter of the twentieth century brought together a group of scholars, represented here in the Shifting Paradigms series, determined to place the study of medieval drama in a broader context than that of solely reading texts. The publication of Records of Early English Drama, the University of Leeds facsimiles of medieval drama manuscripts, the establishment of the journal and annual meetings of Medieval English Theatre, brought a wider perspective to the discipline. And, by no means least, the bringing to bear of all these ground-breaking developments to the mammoth tasks of recreating in the public domain the original-staging of medieval plays. Peter Meredith had a hand in the formation and lasting influence of all these crucial innovations. The variety and depth of his comprehensive approach to the study of medieval drama and theatre is clearly evinced in each of the essays chosen for this volume.
Download or read book Imagining Spectatorship written by John J. McGavin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining Spectatorship is a highly innovative study in the emerging area of early spectatorship, focusing on the spectators' experience to offer new perspectives on early drama.
Download or read book Unsettled Toleration written by Brian Walsh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage historicizes and scrutinizes the unstable concept of toleration as it emerges in drama performed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. Brian Walsh examines plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that represent intra-Christian conflict between mainstream believers and various minorities, analyzing the sometimes explicit, sometimes indirect, occasionally smooth, but more often halting and equivocal forms of dealing with difference that these plays imagine can result from such exchanges. Through innovative and in some cases unprecedented readings of a diverse collection of plays, from Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth, Middleton's The Puritan Widow, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, and Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, Walsh shows how the English stage in the first decade of the seventeenth century, as a social barometer, registered the basic condition of religious "unsettlement " of the post-Reformation era; and concurrently that the stage, as a social incubator, brooded over imagined scenarios of confessional conflict that could end variously in irresolution, accommodation, or even religious syncretism. It thus helped to create, sustain and enlarge an open-ended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world. Attending to this conversation is vital to our present understanding of the state of religious toleration the early modern period, for it gives a fuller picture of the ways religious difference was experienced than the limited and inert pronouncements on the topic that officials of the church and state offered.
Download or read book In Search of the Culprit written by Lukas Rösli and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite various poststructuralist rejections of the idea of a singular author-genius, the question of a textual archetype that can be assigned to a named author is still a common scholarly phantasm. The Romantic idea that an author created a text or even a work autonomously is transferred even to pre-modern literature today. This ignores the fact that the transmission of medieval and early modern literature creates variances that could not be justified by means of singular authorships. The present volume offers new theoretical approaches from English, German, and Scandinavian studies to provide a historically more adequate approach to the question of authorship in premodern literary cultures. Authorship is no longer equated with an extra-textual entity, but is instead considered a narratological, inner- and intertextual function that can be recognized in the retrospectively established beginnings of literature as well as in the medial transformation of texts during the early days of printing. The volume is aimed at interested scholars of all philologies, especially those dealing with the Middle Ages or Early Modern Period.
Download or read book The Chester Cycle in Context 1555 1575 written by Jessica Dell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555-1575 considers the implications of recent archival research which has profoundly changed our view of the continuation of performances of Chester's civic biblical play cycle into the reign of Elizabeth I. Scholars now view the decline and ultimate abandonment of civic religious drama as the result of a complex network of local pressures, heavily dependent upon individual civic and ecclesiastical authorities, rather than a result of a nation-wide policy of suppression, as had previously been assumed.
Download or read book Staging Scripture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against a background which included revolutionary changes in religious belief, extensive enlargement of dramatic styles and the technological innovation of printing, this collection of essays about biblical drama offers innovative approaches to text and performance, while reviewing some well-established critical issues. The Bible in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries appears in a complex of roles in relation to the drama: as an authority and centre of belief, a place of controversy, an emotional experience and, at times, a weapon. This collection brings into focus the new biblical learning, including the re-editing of biblical texts, as well as classical influences, and it gives a unique view of the relationship between the Bible and the drama at a critical time for both. Contributors are: Stephanie Allen, David Bevington, Philip Butterworth, Sarah Carpenter, Philip Crispin, Clifford Davidson, Elisabeth Dutton, Garrett P. J. Epp, Bob Godfrey, Peter Happé, James McBain, Roberta Mullini, Katie Normington, Margaret Rogerson, Charlotte Steenbrugge, Greg Walker, and Diana Wyatt.
Download or read book Performative Literary Culture written by Arjan van Dixhoorn and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performative literary culture emerged as a set of practices that shaped production and distribution of learning in late medieval and early modern Western Europe, both in Latin and the vernacular. Performative literary culture encompasses the plays, songs, and poetry performed for live audiences in (semi-)public spaces and the organizations championing performative literature through meetings and events. These organizations included chambers of rhetoric, confraternities of the Puy, joyous companies, guilds of Meistersingers, the Consistory of Joyful Knowledge, academies, companies of the Basoche and Inns of Court, and the institutions or people organizing the Spanish justas. Written by a team of experts, the contributions in this book explore how performative literary cultures shaped the exchange of public learning, knowledge, and ideas between the oral, theatrical, and literary spheres. Contributors include: Francisco J. Álvarez, Adrian Armstrong, Gabriele Ball , Anita Boele, Cynthia J. Brown, Susanna de Beer, Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, Ignacio García Aguilar, Laura Kendrick, Samuel Mareel, Inmaculada Osuna, Bart Ramakers, Dylan Reid, Catrien Santing, Susie Speakman Sutch, and Arjan van Dixhoorn.
Download or read book Late Shakespeare 1608 1613 written by Andrew J. Power and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, leading international Shakespeare scholars provide a contextually informed approach to Shakespeare's last seven plays.
Download or read book Queer Shakespeare written by Goran Stanivukovic and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality draws together 13 essays, which offer a major reassessment of the criticism of desire, body and sexuality in Shakespeare's drama and poetry. Bringing together some of the most prominent critics working at the intersection of Shakespeare criticism and queer theory, this collection demonstrates the vibrancy of queer Shakespeare studies. Taken together, these essays explore embodiment, desire, sexuality and gender as key objects of analyses, producing concepts and ideas that draw critical energy from focused studies of time, language and nature. The Afterword extends these inquiries by linking the Anthropocene and queer ecology with Shakespeare criticism. Works from Shakespeare's entire canon feature in essays which explore topics like glass, love, antitheatrical homophobia, size, narrative, sound, female same-sex desire and Petrarchism, weather, usury and sodomy, male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing, contagion, and antisocial procreation.
Download or read book In the Mirror of the Prodigal Son written by Pietro Delcorno and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Mirror of the Prodigal Son provides a comprehensive history of the function of the parable of the prodigal son in shaping religious identity in medieval and Reformation Europe. By investigating a wealth of primary sources, the book reveals the interaction between commentaries, sermons, religious plays, and images as a decisive factor in the increasing popularity of the prodigal son. Pietro Delcorno highlights the ingenious and multifaceted uses of the parable within pastoral activities and shows the pervasive presence of the Bible in medieval communication. The prodigal son narrative became the ideal story to convey a discourse about sin and penance, grace and salvation. In this way, the parable was established as the paradigmatic biography of any believer.
