Download or read book Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama written by Jeremy Lopez and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Lopez proposes that understanding the potential for theatrical failure - the way playwrights anticipated it and audiences responded to it - is crucial for understanding how the drama succeeded on the stage.
Download or read book Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres written by Matthew Steggle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did Shakespeare's original audiences weep? Equally, while it seems obvious that they must have laughed at plays performed in early modern theatres, can we say anything about what their laughter sounded like, about when it occurred, and about how, culturally, it was interpreted? Related to both of these problems of audience behaviour is that of the stage representation of laughing, and weeping, both actions performed with astonishing frequency in early modern drama. Each action is associated with a complex set of non-verbal noises, gestures, and cultural overtones, and each is linked to audience behaviour through one of the axioms of Renaissance dramatic theory: that weeping and laughter on stage cause, respectively, weeping and laughter in the audience. This book is a study of laughter and weeping in English theatres, broadly defined, from around 1550 until their closure in 1642. It is concerned both with the representation of these actions on the stage, and with what can be reconstructed about the laughter and weeping of theatrical audiences themselves, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.
Download or read book Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama written by Jeremy Lopez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book provides the first ever history of the canon of Renaissance drama.
Download or read book Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama written by Jeremy Lopez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-12-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Besides providing readings of plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, it also places Shakespeare emphatically within his own theatrical context, and focuses on the relationship between the demanding repertory system of the time and the conventions and content of the plays. Lopez argues that the limitations of the relatively bare stage and non-naturalistic mode of early modern theatre would have made the potential for failure very great, and he proposes that understanding this potential for failure is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on stage. The book offers perspectives on familiar conventions such as the pun, the aside and the expository speech; and it works toward a definition of early modern theatrical genres based on the relationship between these well-known conventions and the incoherent experience of early modern theatrical narratives.
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 2023-01-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lauren Robertson shows how the commercial theater transformed early modernity's crisis of uncertainty into spectacular onstage display.
Download or read book Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London written by Eric Dunnum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-18 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience. This study analyses how, out of anxiety that unruly audiences would destroy the nascent industry of professional drama in England, playwrights sought to limit the effect that their plays could have on the audience. They tried to construct playgoing through their drama in the hopes of creating a less-reactive, more pensive, and controlled playgoer. The result was the radical experimentation in dramaturgy that, in part, defines Renaissance drama. Written for scholars of Early Modern and Renaissance Drama and Theatre, Theatre History, and Early Modern and Renaissance History, this book calls for a new focus on the local economic concerns of the theatre companies as a way to understand the motivation behind the drama of early modern London.
Download or read book Prologues to Shakespeare s Theatre written by Douglas Bruster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable study shows how prologues ushered audience and actors through a rite of passage and how they can be seen to offer rich insight into what the early modern theatre was thought capable of achieving.
Download or read book Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama 1558 1642 written by J. Low and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-25 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection builds on the latest research on the topic of theatre audiences in early modern England. In broad terms, the project answers the question, 'How do we define the relationships between performance and audience?'.
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 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 Richard II written by Jeremy Lopez and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides an introductory guide to Richard II offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of three or four key performances and productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, a wide sampling of critical opinion and further reading.
Download or read book Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre written by Bill Angus and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre offers insight into why the early modern stage abounds with informer and intelligencer figures.
Download or read book Performing Early Modern Drama Today written by Associate Professor of Early Modern Performance Studies Pascale Aebischer and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While much attention has been devoted to performances of Shakespeare's plays today, little has been focused on modern productions of the plays of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Webster and Jonson. Performing Early Modern Drama Today offers an overview of early modern performance, featuring chapters by academics, teachers and practitioners, incorporating a variety of approaches. The book examines modern performances in both Britain and America and includes interviews with influential directors, close analysis of particular stage and screen adaptations and detailed appendices of professional and amateur productions. Chapters examine intellectual and practical opportunities to analyse what is at stake when the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are performed by ours. Whether experimenting with original performance practices or contemporary theatrical and cinematic ones, productions of early modern drama offer an inspiring, sometimes unusual, always interesting perspective on the plays they interpret for modern audiences.
Download or read book Community Making in Early Stuart Theatres written by Anthony W. Johnson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences? And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship, theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights’ professional and linguistic networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies. In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances of hall playhouses, court masques, women’s drama, country-house theatricals, and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.
Download or read book Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England written by Simon Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a new, interdisciplinary account of early modern drama through the lens of playing and playgoing.
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 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.
