Download or read book Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama written by Andrew Griffin and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades before history was institutionalized as a scholarly discipline, historical writing was practiced variously by poets, record keepers, lawyers, sermonizers, mythologizers, and philosophers. In this welter of competing forms of historical thought, early modern drama often operated as a site in which claims about the nature of historical change could be treated in a frequently conflicting manner. To explore this arena of competing forms of historical explanation, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama focuses on the problem of narrative abruption in a selection of historically minded early modern plays as they rely on various strategies to make sense of biography and fatality. Arguing that narrative forms fail in the face of untimely death, Andrew Griffin shows that the disruption appears as a matter of trauma, making the untimely death both a point of narrative conflict and a social problem. Exploring the formula that early modern dramatists used to make sense of life and death, this book draws on the wider context of this period’s culture of historical writing.
Download or read book Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama written by Andrew Griffin and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades before history was institutionalized as a scholarly discipline, historical writing was practiced variously by poets, record keepers, lawyers, sermonizers, mythologizers, and philosophers. In this welter of competing forms of historical thought, early modern drama often operated as a site in which claims about the nature of historical change could be treated in a frequently conflicting manner. To explore this arena of competing forms of historical explanation, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama focuses on the problem of narrative abruption in a selection of historically minded early modern plays as they rely on various strategies to make sense of biography and fatality. Arguing that narrative forms fail in the face of untimely death, Andrew Griffin shows that the disruption appears as a matter of trauma, making the untimely death both a point of narrative conflict and a social problem. Exploring the formula that early modern dramatists used to make sense of life and death, this book draws on the wider context of this period's culture of historical writing.
Download or read book This Action of Our Death written by Michael Cameron Andrews and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars written by Heidi Craig and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.
Download or read book Issues of Death written by Michael Neill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues of Death offers a fresh approach to the tragic drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Starting from the premise that "death" is a historical construct that is differently experienced in every culture, it treats Renaissance tragedy as an instrument for reimagining the human encounter with death. Analyses of major plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, and Ford explore the relation of tragedy to the macabre tradition, to the apocalyptic displays of the anatomy theatre, and to the spectacular arts of funeral.
Download or read book The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage written by Phoebe S. Spinrad and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Death Arts in Renaissance England written by William E. Engel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever critical anthology of the death arts in Renaissance England, this book draws together over 60 extracts and 20 illustrations to establish and analyse how people grappled with mortality in the 16th and 17th centuries. As well as providing a comprehensive resource of annotated and modernized excerpts, this engaging study includes commentary on authors and overall texts, discussions of how each excerpt is constitutive and expressive of the death arts, and suggestions for further reading. The extended Introduction takes into account death's intersections with print, gender, sex, and race, surveying the period's far-reaching preoccupation with, and anticipatory reflection upon, the cessation of life. For researchers, instructors, and students interested in medieval and early modern history and literature, the Reformation, memory studies, book history, and print culture, this indispensable resource provides at once an entry point into the field of early modern death studies and a springboard for further research.
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 How to Do Things with Dead People written by Alice Dailey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies such as literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning. By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.
Download or read book Staging Death written by Mary-Elizabeth Lough and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Staging Britain s Past written by Kim Gilchrist and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Britain's Past is the first study of the early modern performance of Britain's pre-Roman history. The mythic history of the founding of Britain by the Trojan exile Brute and the subsequent reign of his descendants was performed through texts such as Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc, Shakespeare's King Lear and Cymbeline, as well as civic pageants, court masques and royal entries such as Elizabeth I's 1578 entry to Norwich. Gilchrist argues for the power of performed history to shape early modern conceptions of the past, ancestry, and national destiny, and demonstrates how the erosion of the Brutan histories marks a transformation in English self-understanding and identity. When published in 1608, Shakespeare's King Lear claimed to be a “True Chronicle History”. Lear was said to have ruled Britain centuries before the Romans, a descendant of the mighty Trojan Brute who had conquered Britain and slaughtered its barbaric giants. But this was fake history. Shakespeare's contemporaries were discovering that Brute and his descendants, once widely believed as proof of glorious ancient origins, were a mischievous medieval invention. Offering a comprehensive account of the extraordinary theatrical tradition that emerged from these Brutan histories and the reasons for that tradition's disappearance, this study gathers all known evidence of the plays, pageants and masques portraying Britain's ancient rulers. Staging Britain's Past reveals how the loss of England's Trojan origins is reflected in plays and performances from Gorboduc's powerful invocation of history to Cymbeline's elegiac erosion of all notions of historical truth.
Download or read book Locating the Queen s Men 1583 1603 written by Holger Schott Syme and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Locating the Queen's Men presents new and groundbreaking essays on early modern England's most prominent acting company, from their establishment in 1583 into the 1590s. Offering a far more detailed critical engagement with the plays than is available elsewhere, this volume situates the company in the theatrical and economic context of their time. The essays gathered here focus on four different aspects: playing spaces, repertory, play-types, and performance style, beginning with essays devoted to touring conditions, performances in university towns, London inns and theatres, and the patronage system under Queen Elizabeth. Repertory studies, unique to this volume, consider the elements of the company's distinctive style, and how this style may have influenced, for example, Shakespeare's Henry V. Contributors explore two distinct genres, the morality and the history play, especially focussing on the use of stock characters and on male/female relationships. Revising standard accounts of late Elizabeth theatre history, this collection shows that the Queen's Men, often understood as the last rear-guard of the old theatre, were a vital force that enjoyed continued success in the provinces and in London, representative of the abiding appeal of an older, more ostentatiously theatrical form of drama.
Download or read book Anthologizing Shakespeare 1593 1603 written by Ted Tregear and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-13 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1599 and 1601, no fewer than five anthologies appeared in print with extracts from Shakespeare's works. Some featured whole poems, while others chose short passages from his poems and plays, gathered alongside lines on similar topics by his rivals and contemporaries. Appearing midway through his career, these anthologies marked a critical moment in Shakespeare's life. They testify to the reputation he had established as a poet and playwright by the end of the sixteenth century. In extracting passages from their contexts, though, they also read Shakespeare in ways that he might have imagined being read. After all, this was how early modern readers were taught to treat the texts they read, selecting choice excerpts and copying them into their notebooks. Taking its cue from these anthologies, Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 offers new readings of the formative works of Shakespeare's first decade in print, from Venus and Adonis (1593) to Hamlet (1603). It illuminates a previously neglected period in Shakespeare's career, what it calls his 'anthology period'. It investigates what these anthologies made of Shakespeare, and what he made of being anthologized. And it shows how, from the early 1590s, his works were inflected by the culture of commonplacing and anthologizing in which they were written, and in which Shakespeare, no less than his readers, was schooled. In this book, Ted Tregear explores how Shakespeare appealed to the reading habits of his contemporaries, inviting and frustrating them in turn. Shakespeare, he argues, used the practice of anthologizing to open up questions at the heart of his poems and plays: questions of classical literature and the schoolrooms in which it was taught; of English poetry and its literary inheritance; of poetry's relationship with drama; and of the afterlife he and his works might win--at least in parts.
Download or read book Resurrection Doctrine and the Plot of False Death in English Renaissance Drama written by Jacob Israel Littleton and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Staging Death the Corpse in Renaissance Drama written by Mary-Elizabeth Lough and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the body during the Renaissance became a critical focus in the 2000s. Works such as Michael Schoenfeldt's Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (2000) and Susan Zimmerman's 2005 The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare 's Theatre exhumed the corpse for understanding the impact of the material body on literature and culture. In my dissertation I go beyond the important groundwork laid by these texts by dissecting the material reality of the staged corpse. I consider how the staged corpse achieved an apogee when high mortality rates, radical changes in belief and a cultural shift away from the traditional rigidity of the feudal system all combined to make the corpse a marker of changing social reality in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I analyze the relationship between contemporary beliefs about the dead and dramatic representation of the corpse. Renaissance beliefs varied with a deeply rooted concern over the place of the dead. This growing array of beliefs was reflected in shifting practices. For example, The Book of Common Prayer moved from acknowledging the dead as present in early funeral rites to absent. Funerary practice surrounding official doctrine followed an inverse trajectory as the impersonal heraldic funeral was replaced by highly individualistic nocturnal funerals of the Jacobean period. My dissertation uncovers and investigates the connections between these two seemingly opposite trends as they play out in drama. The centrality and number of dramatically significant corpses staged in this period is staggering. I argue that the corpse served to present and challenge vital cultural concerns using the dead body as a major focus of dramatic interest. The staged presence of Andrea throughout The Spanish Tragedy directly addressed the growing cultural concern with the re-shaping and questioning of the spatial layout of the afterlife. Both Titus Andronicus and Hamlet raised questions about what kind of expiation is demanded and deserved by the dead and its effect on the living. Finally, both Samson Agonistes and The Revenger's Tragedy raised chilling questions about the ontological status of the dead in regard to predestination and free will.
Download or read book Ghosts and Dreams in the Renaissance Drama A Comparison Between Selected Tragedies written by Tinani Van Niekerk and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-08 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: Gut, University of Bonn (Institut f r Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie), course: Revenge in the Renaissance, 9 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Sinister, unearthly, sometimes even all-knowing: Ghosts and metaphysical entities accompany stories, legends and and superstitious tales throughout the centuries. They are doomed as evil and satanic, or used to illustrate morality by "settling" their earthly bussiness with human evil-doers. They might even be good, yet can never completely to be trusted. Their connection with the dead makes them attractive as characters with powers above the human boundries. In the Elizabethan drama as in contrast to modern dramas, supernatural events and entities such as ghosts, apparitions, dreams and visions play a major and sometimes even crucial role in the plot. In this paper I would like to take a closer look at the Elizabethan fascination with the "unseen", how authors implemented it into their plays and what roles these ghosts and dreams played. Introductory I will look at the general view of the unnatrural from the Renaissance perspective. In order to stay within the proper range of this paper I have chosen a selection of four tragedies written by four different playwrights. In each of the plays, a ghostly character appears, mostly in dreamlike visions. I would like to discuss the scenes in which these characters appear and compare the characters with another in the conclusion of the paper.
Download or read book George Gascoigne written by Gillian Austen and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First modern full-length study of the Elizabethan poet George Gascoigne.
