Download or read book The Unruly Womb in Early Modern Drama written by Ursula A. Potter and published by Late Tudor and Stuart Drama. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of 'unruly' wombs in drama brings to light the hidden but powerful role female biology played on stage for early modern audiences.
Download or read book The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama written by Ursula A. Potter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She analyzes how playwrights employed visual and verbal clues to identify the sexual status of female characters to engage their audiences with popular concepts of women’s health; and how they satirized the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite, suggesting that men who fear it have been duped. But the study also recognizes that, as these dramatists were fully aware, merely by bringing such material to the stage so frequently, they were complicit in perpetuating such theories.
Download or read book Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama written by Theodora A. Jankowski and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Directions in Early Modern English Drama written by Aidan Norrie and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Recent scholarship has begun to think more critically about the edge, particularly in relation to the canon and canonicity. This book demonstrates that the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theaters, and audiences. The book engages with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality to acknowledge and extend the rich sense of playmaking and all its ancillary activities that have emerged over the last decade. The essays by a global team of scholars bring to life people and practices that flourished on the edge, manifesting their importance to both early modern audiences, and to current readers and performers.
Download or read book Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford written by Katarzyna Burzyńska and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare’s and his contemporaries’ drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Phenomenology of pregnancy is a fairly new and radical body of philosophy that questions the post-Cartesian chasm of an almost autonomous reason and an enclosed and self-sufficient (male) body as foundations of identity. Early modern drama, as is argued, was written and staged at the backdrop of revolutionary changes in medicine and science where old and new theories on the embodied self-clashed. In this world where more and more men were expected to steadily grow isolated from their bodies, the pregnant body constituted an embattled contradiction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment this book offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a plethora of pregnant characters and their “pregnant embodiment” in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency. Despite seemingly disparate experiences of the selected heroines and the repeated attempts at containment of their “unruly” bodies, the ever transforming and “spatial” pregnant identities remain loci of embodied selfhood and agency. This book provocatively argues that fictional characters’ experience reflects tangible realities of early modern women, while often deflecting the scientific consensus on reproduction in the period.
Download or read book Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds written by Mackenzie Cooley and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things - ranging from pollen in a gust of wind to a carnivorous pitcher plant to a shell-like skinned armadillo - and the humans enthralled with them. Episodes from 1500 to the early 1900s reveal connected histories across early modern worlds as natural things traveled across the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, the Spanish Empire, and Western Europe. In distant worlds that were constantly changing with expanding networks of trade, colonial aspirations, and the rise of empiricism, natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins. Tracing the processes of their displacement, each chapter starts with a piece of original artwork that relies on digital collage to pull image sources out of place and to represent meanings that natural things lost and remade. Accessible and elegant, Natural Things is the first study of its kind to combine original visualizations with the history of science. Museum-goers, scholars, scientists, and students will find new histories of nature and collecting within. Its playful visuality will capture the imagination of non-academic and academic readers alike while reminding us of the alienating capacity of the modern life sciences.
Download or read book Why Talk About Madness written by Catharine Coleborne and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This short book argues for the relevance of historical perspectives on mental health, exploring how these histories can and should inform debates about mental healthcare today. Why is it important to study the history of madness? What does it mean to voice these histories? What can these tell us about the challenges and legacies of mental health care across the world today? Offering an intervention into new ways of thinking – and talking – about ‘mad’ history, Catharine Coleborne explores the social and cultural impact of the history of the mad movement, self-help and mental health consumer advocacy from the 1960s inside a longer tradition of ‘writing madness’. Starting with a brief history of the relevance of first-person accounts, then looking at the significance of other ways of representing the psychiatric ‘patient’, ‘survivor’ or ‘consumer’ over time, this book aims to escape from dominant modes of writing about the asylum.
Download or read book Kingship Madness and Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage written by Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kingship, Madness, and Masculinity examines representations of mad kings in early modern English theatrical texts and performance practices. Although there have been numerous volumes examining the medical and social dimensions of mental illness in the early modern period, and a few that have examined stage representations of such conditions, this volume is unique in its focus on the relationships between madness, kingship, and the anxiety of lost or fragile masculinity. The chapters uncover how, as the early modern understanding of mental illness refocused on human, rather than supernatural, causes, public stages became important arenas for playwrights, actors, and audiences to explore expressions of madness and to practice diagnoses. Throughout the volume, the authors engage with the field of disability studies to show how disability and mental health were portrayed on stage and what those representations reveal about the period and the people who lived in it. Altogether, the essays question what happens when theatrical expressions of madness are mapped onto the bodies of actors playing kings, and how the threat of diminished masculinity affects representations of power. This volume is the ideal resource for students and scholars interested in the history of kingship, gender, and politics in early modern drama.
Download or read book Dramatic Difference written by Karen Raber and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dramatic Difference offers an important contribution to the study of early modern women writers, and at the same time invites scholars and critics of the theater to reassess the place of closet drama - and the presence of women dramatists - in the early modern dramatic tradition."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama written by Ariane M. Balizet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, the author argues that blood was, crucially, a means by which dramatists negotiated shifting contours of domesticity in 16th and 17th century England. Early modern English drama vividly addressed contemporary debates over an expanding idea of "the domestic," which encompassed the domus as well as sex, parenthood, household order, the relationship between home and state, and the connections between family honor and national identity. The author contends that the domestic ideology expressed by theatrical depictions of marriage and household order is one built on the simultaneous familiarity and violence inherent to blood. The theatrical relation between blood and home is far more intricate than the idealized language of the familial bloodline; the home was itself a bloody place, with domestic bloodstains signifying a range of experiences including religious worship, sex, murder, birth, healing, and holy justice. Focusing on four bleeding figures—the Bleeding Bride, Bleeding Husband, Bleeding Child, and Bleeding Patient—the author argues that the household blood of the early modern stage not only expressed the violence and conflict occasioned by domestic ideology, but also established the home as a site that alternately reified and challenged patriarchal authority.
Download or read book Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage written by Amy Kenny and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-21 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the humoral womb was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the Shakespearean stage by considering the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. Galenic naturalism applied the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—to delineate women as porous, polluting, and susceptible to their environment. This book draws on early modern medical texts to provocatively demonstrate how Shakespeare’s canon offers a unique agency to female characters via humoral discourse of the womb. Chapters discuss early modern medicine’s attempt to theorize and interpret the womb, specifically its role in disease, excretion, and conception, alongside passages of Shakespeare’s plays to offer a fresh reading of (geo)humoral subjectivity. The book shows how Shakespeare subversively challenges contemporary notions of female fluidity by accentuating the significance of the womb as a source of self-defiance and autonomy for female characters across his canon.
Download or read book Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare s World written by Caroline Bicks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting-edge theories of cognition inform readings of Shakespearean girls to show the dynamism of adolescent female brainwork.
Download or read book Performing Maternity in Early Modern England written by Kathryn R. McPherson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity's cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540-1690. The essays interrogate how early modern texts depict fertility, conception, delivery and gendered constructions of maternity by analyzing a wealth of historical documents and images in conjunction with dramatic and non-dramatic literary texts. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production of gender identity during the early modern period.
Download or read book Consent in Shakespeare written by Artemis Preeshl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By examining how female characters speak and act during coming of age, engagement, marriage, and intimacy, Consent in Shakespeare will enhance understanding about how and why women spoke, remained silent, or acted as they did in relation to their intimate partners in Early Modern and contemporary private and public situations in and around the Mediterranean. Consent in intimate relationships is front and center in today’s conversations. This book re-examines the verbal and physical interactions of female-identified characters in Early Modern and contemporary cultures in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean comedies and the sources from which he derived his plays. This re-examination of the words that women say or do not say, and actions that women do or do not take, in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays and his probable sources sheds light on how Shakespeare’s audiences might have perceived Mediterranean cultural mores and norms. Assessment of source materials for Shakespeare’s comedies set in the Balkans, France, Italy, the Near East, North Africa, and Spain suggests how women of diverse backgrounds communicated in everyday life and peak life experiences in the Early Modern era. Given Shakespeare’s impact worldwide, this initiative to shift the conversation about the power of consent of female protagonists and supporting characters in Shakespeare’s Mediterranean plays will further transform conversations about consent in class, board and conference rooms, and the international stage.
Download or read book Hamlet s Hereditary Queen written by Kerrie Roberts and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a fresh and insightful interpretation of Hamlet’s Gertrude as a prominent and powerful figure in the play. It shows how traditional readings of this character, both performance-based and scholarly, have been guided and constrained by misogynistic perspectives on female power. Bringing together the author’s wealth of insight from a theatre practitioner’s perspective and combining it with a scholarly perspective, the book argues that Gertrude need not be limited to sex and motherhood. She could instead be played as Denmark’s blood royal Queen, her role in the play then being about female political power. Gertrude’s royal status could play out on stage through a variety of possible performance choices for stage design, stage business, acting processes, and the actor’s presence – both speaking and silent. Hamlet's Hereditary Queen takes into consideration Shakespeare’s source myths, historical studies of the position of queens and the issues concerning them in early modern England, Hamlet’s performance history, and the text itself. It questions traditional readings of Hamlet, and offers detailed analyses of relevant scenes to demonstrate how Gertrude’s Hamlet might play out on stage in the twenty-first century. This is an engaging and insightful interpretation for students and scholars of theatre and performance studies and Shakespeare studies, as well as theatre practitioners.
Download or read book Horrid Spectacle written by Deborah G. Burks and published by Duquesne. This book was released on 2003 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early modern England, scenes of torture, murder, and infidelity were often graphically depicted on the stage. In this study, Burks examines the trope of violation in the theater of early modern England and explores the connections between these theatrical representations and the use of violation imagery in a range of other public and private discourses. Her analysis encompasses texts such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Aphra Behn's The City Heiress, Arbella Stuart Seymour's letters, and Margaret Cavendish's fiction and drama. This study of violation, one of the most potent, ubiquitous, and durable tropes of the English Reformation, explores the connections between these theatrical representations and the use of violation imagery in a range of public and private discourses, from Protestant polemic, parliamentary legislation and political pamphlets, to aristocratic letters, royalist fiction and "regicidal" histories. Burks considers private and political writing alongside literary texts; the disparate motives, modes of address and methods of transmission of each type of writing thus serve as foils for one another. Burks also places women writers in the company of their male peers without segregating or prioritizing either gender group.
Download or read book Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy, partly because the story of Troy was in a sense the story of England, since the Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War. Texts covered include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and The Tempest as well as plays by other authors of the period including Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher.
