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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare written by Daisy Murray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction -- 1 Tragedies: The Duchess of Malfi and The Cruel Brother -- 2 Tragicomedies: The Devil's Law Case, The Twins, and The Lovesick Court -- 3 Comedies: Changes: or, Love in a Maze, Patient Grissil, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Ignoramus, and Senile Odium -- 4 Shakespearean Comedy: The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index
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 2018-08-23 with total page 198 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 Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England written by Karen Bamford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though recent scholarship has focused both on motherhood and on romance literature in early modern England, until now, no full length volume has addressed the notable intersections between the two topics. This collection contributes to the scholarly investigation of maternity in early modern England by scrutinizing romance narratives in various forms, considering motherhood not as it was actually lived, but as it was figured in the fantasy world of romance by authors ranging from Edmund Spenser to Margaret Cavendish. Contributors explore the traditional association between romance and women, both as readers of fiction and as tellers of ’old wives’ tales,’ as well as the tendency of romance plots, with their emphasis on the family and its reproduction, to foreground matters of maternity. Collectively, the essays in this volume invite reflection on the uses to which Renaissance culture put maternal stereotypes (the virgin mother, the cruel step-dame), as well as the powerful fears and desires that mothers evoke, assuage and sometimes express in the fantasy world of romance.
Download or read book Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare s England written by Caroline Bicks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the intersections of early modern literature and history, Shakespeare and Women's Studies, Midwiving Subjects explores how Shakespearean drama and contemporary medical, religious and popular texts figured the midwife as a central producer of the body's cultural markers. In addition to attending most Englishwomen's births and testifying to their in extremis confessions about paternity, the midwife allegedly controlled the size of one's tongue and genitals at birth and was obligated to perform virginity exams, impotence tests and emergency baptisms. The signs of purity and masculinity, paternity and salvation were inherently open to interpretation, yet early modern culture authorized midwives to generate and announce them. Midwiving Subjects, then, challenges recent studies that read the midwife as a woman whose power was limited to a marginal and unruly birthroom community and instead uncovers the midwife's foundational role, not only in the rituals of reproduction, but in the process of cultural production itself. As a result of recent changes in managed healthcare and of increased attention to uncovering histories of women's experiences, midwives - past and present - are currently a subject of great interest. This book will appeal to readers interested in Shakespeare as well as the history of women and medicine.
Download or read book Women s Household Drama written by Jane Cavendish and published by Iter Press. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents three plays by women that were written in specific household contexts and survive in distinctive handwritten copies dating from their authors’ lifetimes. Care is taken in the introductions, notes, and apparatus to make the plays accessible to non-specialist readers while also preserving early modern orthography, punctuation, and manuscript practices. Each play is presented in an edited old-spelling text and set within its literary, biographical, and theatrical context. The volume as a whole foregrounds the early modern household as a uniquely productive setting for women’s theatrical and literary activity. Volume 66 in the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Chicago Series
Download or read book Travel and Travail written by Mary C. Fuller and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.
