Download or read book This Wide and Universal Theater written by David Bevington and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines how Shakespeare's plays have been transformed for the stage by the demands of theatrical spaces and staging conventions.
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 Free Will written by Richard Wilson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage is a study of theatre and sovereignty that situates Shakespeare’s plays in the contraflow between two absolutisms of early modern England: the aesthetic and the political. Starting from the dramatist’s cringing relations with his princely patrons, Richard Wilson considers the ways in which this ‘bending author’ identifies freedom in failure and power in weakness by staging the endgames of a sovereignty that begs to be set free from itself. The arc of Shakespeare’s career becomes in this comprehensive new interpretation a sustained resistance to both the institutions of sacred kingship and literary autonomy that were emerging in his time. In a sequence of close material readings, Free Will shows how the plays instead turn command performances into celebrations of an art without sovereignty, which might ‘give delight’ but ‘hurt not’, and ‘leave not a rack behind’. Free Will is a profound rereading of Shakespeare, art and power that will contribute to thinking not only about the plays, but also about aesthetics, modernity, sovereignty and violence.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance written by Paul Yachnin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatrical performance, suggest the contributors to this volume, can be an unpredictable, individual experience as well as a communal, institutional or cultural event. The essays collected here use the tools of theatre history in their investigation into the phenomenology of the performance experience, yet they are also careful to consider the social, ideological and institutional contingencies that determine the production and reception of the living spectacle. Thus contributors combine a formalist interest in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of language and spectacle with an investment in the material cultures that both produced and received Shakespeare's plays. Six of the chapters focus on early modern cultures of performance, looking specifically at such topics as the performance of rusticity; the culture of credit; contract and performance; the cultivation of Englishness; religious ritual; and mourning and memory. Building upon and interrelating with the preceding essays, the last three chapters deal with Shakespeare and performance culture in modernity. They focus on themes including literary and theatrical performance anxiety; cultural iconicity; and the performance of Shakespearean lateness. This collection strives to bring better understanding to Shakespeare's imaginative investment in the relationship between theatrical production and the emotional, intellectual and cultural effects of performance broadly defined in social terms.
Download or read book The Shakespearean Death Arts written by William E. Engel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to view Shakespeare’s plays from the prospect of the premodern death arts, not only the ars moriendi tradition but also the plurality of cultural expressions of memento mori, funeral rituals, commemorative activities, and rhetorical techniques and strategies fundamental to the performance of the work of dying, death, and the dead. The volume is divided into two sections: first, critically nuanced examinations of Shakespeare’s corpus and then, second, of Hamlet exclusively as the ultimate proving ground of the death arts in practice. This book revitalizes discussion around key and enduring themes of mortality by reframing Shakespeare’s plays within a newly conceptualized historical category that posits a cultural divide—at once epistemological and phenomenological—between premodernity and the Enlightenment.
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 The Politics of Performing Shakespeare for Young People written by Jan Wozniak and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the value of performing Shakespeare's plays for young people? Using interviews with theatre workers, rehearsal observations and workshops with young people, this book argues that, rather than promoting a range of pre-determined textual understandings of the plays, it is by trusting young people's experience of performances that they might gain most benefit. It argues that by privileging the meanings young people make of Shakespeare, new and exciting interpretations of his work might be found. Drawing on case studies from theatre companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, Tiny Ninja Theatre Company and Company of Angels Theatre Company, Jan Wozniak shows how the collaboration and materiality of performance is central to empowering young people to engage with, enjoy and challenge Shakespeare.
Download or read book Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage written by Andrew Bozio and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this, first, by establishing how characters think through their surroundings — not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations, but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorise and thematise the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as The Malcontent, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine, King Lear, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Bartholomew Fair, this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how, in doing so, theatre altered the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and imagined place in early modern England.
Download or read book Thomas Betterton written by David Roberts and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Restoration London's leading actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton has not been the subject of a biography since 1891. He worked with all the best-known playwrights of his age and with the first generation of English actresses; he was intimately involved in the theatre's responses to politics, and became a friend of leading literary men such as Pope and Steele. His innovations in scenery and company management, and his association with the dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare, helped to change the culture of English theatre. David Roberts's entertaining study unearths new documents and draws fresh conclusions about this major but shadowy figure. It contextualizes key performances and examines Betterton's relationship to patrons, colleagues and family, as well as to significant historical moments and artefacts. The most substantial study available of any seventeenth-century actor, Thomas Betterton gives one of England's greatest performing artists his due on the tercentenary of his death.
Download or read book William Shakespeare Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide written by David Bevington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.
Download or read book Theater Enough written by Jeffrey H. Richards and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early settlers in America had a special relationship to the theater. Though largely without a theater of their own, they developed an ideology of theater that expressed their sense of history, as well as their version of life in the New World. Theater Enough provides an innovative analysis of early American culture by examining the rhetorical shaping of the experience of settlement in the new land through the metaphor of theater. The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theater emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists' lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H. Richards examines a variety of texts--histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays--and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Otis Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi--the world depicted as a stage--in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political, and historical attitudes.
Download or read book From Page to Performance written by John A. Alford and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of 22 essays by scholars in the field of Medieval Drama, mostly relating to performance both past and present. Alford wrote one essay in the book.
Download or read book Gale Researcher Guide for Reading and Responding to British Drama written by Kirilka Stavreva and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gale Researcher Guide for: Reading and Responding to British Drama is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
Download or read book As If Essays in As You Like It written by William N. West and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's As You Like It is a play without a theme. Instead, it repeatedly poses one question in a variety of forms: What if the world were other than it is? As You Like It is a set of experiments in which its characters conditionally change an aspect of their world and see what comes of it: what if I were not a girl but a man? What if I were not a duke, but someone like Robin Hood? What if I were a deer? "What would you say to me now an [that is, "if"] I were your very, very Rosalind?" (4.1.64-65). "Much virtue in 'if'," as one of its characters declares near the play's end; 'if' is virtual. It releases force even if the force is not that of what is the case. Change one thing in the world, the play asks, and how else does everything change? In As You Like It, unlike Shakespeare's other plays, the characters themselves are both experiment and experimenters. They assert something about the world that they know is not the case, and their fictions let them explore what would happen if it were-and not only if it were, but something, not otherwise apparent, about how it is now. What is as you like it? What is it that you, or anyone, really likes or wants? The characters of As You Like It stand in 'if' as at a hinge of thought and action, conscious that they desire something, not wholly capable of getting it, not even able to say what it is. Their awareness that the world could be different than it is, is a step towards making it something that they wish it to be, and towards learning what that would be. Their audiences are not exempt. As You Like It doesn't tell us that it knows what we like and will give it to us. It pushes us to find out. Over the course of the play, characters and audiences experiment with other ways the world could be and come closer to learning what they do like, and how their world can be more as they like it. By exploring ways the world can be different than it is, the characters of As You Like It strive to make the world a place in which they can be at home, not as a utopia-Arden may promise that, but certainly doesn't fulfill it-but as an ongoing work of living. We get a sense at the play's end not that things have been settled once and for all, but that the characters have taken time to breathe-to live in their new situations until they discover better ones, or until they discover newer desires. As You Like It, in other words, is a kind of essay: a set of tests or attempts to be differently in the world, and to see what happens. These essays in As If: As You Like It, originally commissioned as an introductory guide for students, actors, and admirers of the play, trace the force and virtue of someof the claims of the play that run counter to what is the case-its 'ifs.' William N. West is Associate Professor of English, Classics, and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also chair of the Department of Classics and co-editor of the journal Renaissance Drama. He is co-editor (with Helen Higbee) of Robert Weimann's Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cambridge, 2000) and (with Bryan Reynolds) of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005). In addition to his book Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (2002), he has recently published articles on Romeo and Juliet's understudies, irony and encyclopedic writing before and after the Enlightenment, Ophelia's intertheatricality (with Gina Bloom and Anston Bosman), humanism and the resistance to theology, Shakespeare's matter, and conversation as a theory of knowledge in Browne's Pseudodoxia. His work has been supported by grants from the NEH and the Beinecke, Folger, Huntington, and Newberry libraries.
Download or read book The Great Cryptogram written by Ignatius Donnelly and published by S. Low Marston Searly & Rivington. This book was released on 1888 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Alchemist written by Erin Julian and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eponymous alchemist of Ben Jonson's quick-fire comedy is a fraud: he cannot make gold, but he does make brilliant theatre. The Alchemist is a masterpiece of wit and form about the self-delusions of greed and the theatricality of deception. This guide will be useful to a diverse assembly of students and scholars, offering fresh new ways into this challenging and fascinating play.
Download or read book The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare written by William Shakespeare and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The quotations are arranged by topic and indexed by character, play, poem, and keyword.
