Download or read book Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth Century English Theater written by Deborah Payne Fisk and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth. By reading well-known works in unexpected ways and focusing on less frequently studied dramatists, from Sedley, Motteux, Pix, and Behn to Manley, Trotter, and Shadwell, the contributors also test the limits of the canon. In addition, they suggest that earlier critical perceptions, perhaps even more than the “innate worth” of the plays, determined the shape of the canon. These essays present a different image of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, one that reveals how the drama was a site as important for the negotiation of cultural meaning as were novels and verse satires.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre written by Deborah Payne Fisk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-11 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.
Download or read book English Drama written by Richard W. Bevis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the causes of Restoration drama's licentiousness? How did the elegantly-turned comedy of Congreve become the pointed satire of Fielding? And how did Sheridan and Goldsmith reshape the materials they inherited? In the first account of the entire period for more than a decade, Richard Bevis argues that none of these questions can be answered without an understanding of Augustan and Georgian history. The years between 1660 and 1789 saw considerable political and social upheaval, which is reflected in the eclectic array of dramatic forms that is Georgian theatre's essential characteristic.
Download or read book Revisiting Shakespeare s Lost Play written by Deborah C. Payne and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-02 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays centres on Double Falsehood, Lewis Theobald’s 1727 adaptation of the “lost” play of Cardenio, possibly co-authored by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. In a departure from most scholarship to date, the contributors fold Double Falsehood back into the milieu for which it was created rather than searching for traces of Shakespeare in the text. Robert D. Hume’s knowledge of theatre history permits a fresh take on the forgery question as well as the Shakespeare authorship controversy. Diana Solomon’s understanding of eighteenth-century rape culture and Jean I. Marsden’s command of contemporary adaptation practices both emphasise the play’s immediate social and theatrical contexts. And, finally, Deborah C. Payne’s familiarity with the eighteenth-century stage allows for a reconsideration of Double Falsehood as integral to a debate between Theobald, Alexander Pope, and John Gay over the future of the English drama.
Download or read book Tricksters and Estates written by J. Douglas Canfield and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the Renaissance was the Golden Age of English comedy, the Restoration was the Silver. These comedies are full of tricksters attempting to gain estates, the emblem and the reality of power in late feudal England. The tricksters appear in a number of guises, such as heroines landing their men, younger brothers seeking estates, or Cavaliers threatened with dispossession. The hybrid nature of these plays has long posed problems for critics, and few studies have attempted to deal with their diversity in a comprehensive way. Now one of the leading scholars of Restoration drama offers a cultural history of the period's comedy that puts the plays in perspective and reveals the ideological function they performed in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century. To explain this function, J. Douglas Canfield groups the plays into three categories: social comedy, which underwrites Stuart ideology; subversive comedy, which undercuts it; and comical satire, which challenges it as fundamentally immoral or amoral. Through play-by-play analysis, he demonstrates how most of the comedies support the ideology of the Stuart monarchs and the aristocracy, upholding what they regarded as their natural right to rule because of an innate superiority over all other classes. A significant minority of comedies, however, reveal cracks in class solidarity, portray witty heroines who inhabit the margins of society, or give voice to folk tricksters who embody a democratic force nearly capable of overwhelming class hierarchy. A smaller yet but still significant minority end in no resolution, no restoration, but, at their most radical, playfully portray Stuart ideology as empty rhetoric. Tricksters and Estates is a truly comprehensive work, offering serious critical readings of many plays that have never before received close attention and fresh insights into more familiar works. By juxtaposing the comedies of such lesser-known playwrights as Orrery, Lacy, and Rawlins with those of more familiar figures like Behn, Wycherley, and Dryden, the author invites a greater appreciation than has previously been possible of the meaning and function of Restoration comedy. This intelligent and wide-ranging study promises is a standard work in its field.
Download or read book The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth Century Drama written by Kristina Straub and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 1547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama brings together the work of key playwrights from 1660 to 1800, divided into three main sections: Restoring the Theatre: 1660–1700 Managing Entertainment: 1700–1760 Entertainment in an Age of Revolutions: 1760–1800 Each of the 20 plays featured is accompanied by an extraordinary wealth of print and online supplementary materials, including primary critical sources, commentaries, illustrations, and reviews of productions. Taking in the spectrum of this period’s dramatic landscape—from Restoration tragedy and comedies of manners to ballad opera and gothic spectacle—The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama is an essential resource for students and teachers alike.
Download or read book The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Drama Concise Edition written by J. Douglas Canfield and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2003-04-17 with total page 1055 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, Concise Edition, with twenty-one plays, is half the length of the full anthology without compromising its breadth. Concentrating on plays from the heyday of 1660-1737, it focuses on Restoration drama proper and Revolution drama, with a selection from the early Georgian period and the later Georgian period's "laughing comedy." Seven of the nine sub-genres (personal tragedy, tragicomic romance, social comedy, subversive comedy, corrective satire, menippean satire, and laughing comedy) of the full anthology are represented, with the preponderance of exposure given to the jewel of this theatre, its comedy. Each play is fully annotated and prefaced with an historical introduction. Also included are a general introduction, a statement of procedures, and a glossary.
Download or read book Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater written by Diana Solomon and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often perceived as merely formulaic or historical documents, dramatic prologues and epilogues – players’ comic, poetic bids for the audience’s good opinion – became essential parts of Restoration theater, appearing in over 90 percent of performed and printed plays between 1660 and 1714. Their popularity coincided with the rise of the English actress, and Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater unites these elements in the first book-length study on the subject. It finds that these paratexts provided the first sanctioned space for actresses in Britain to voice ideas in public, communicate directly with other women, and perform comedy – arguably the most powerful type of speech, and one that enabled interrogation of misogynist social practices. This book provides a taxonomy of prologues and epilogues with a corresponding appendix, and demonstrates through case studies of Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield how the study of prologues and epilogues enriches Restoration theater scholarship. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Download or read book English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century 1642 1780 written by George Henry Nettleton and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Business of English Restoration Theatre 1660 1700 written by Deborah C. Payne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deborah C. Payne explores how the duopoly of 1660 impacted company practices, stagecraft, the box office, and actors and writers.
Download or read book The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Drama Concise Edition written by J. Douglas Canfield and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2003-04-17 with total page 1055 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, Concise Edition, with twenty-one plays, is half the length of the full anthology without compromising its breadth. Concentrating on plays from the heyday of 1660-1737, it focuses on Restoration drama proper and Revolution drama, with a selection from the early Georgian period and the later Georgian period’s “laughing comedy.” Seven of the nine sub-genres (personal tragedy, tragicomic romance, social comedy, subversive comedy, corrective satire, menippean satire, and laughing comedy) of the full anthology are represented, with the preponderance of exposure given to the jewel of this theatre, its comedy. Each play is fully annotated and prefaced with an historical introduction. Also included are a general introduction, a statement of procedures, and a glossary.
Download or read book Character s Theater written by Lisa A. Freeman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the whole world acted the player, how did the player act the world? In Character's Theater, Lisa A. Freeman uses this question to test recent critical discussion of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Much current work, she observes, focuses on the concept of theatricality as both the governing metaphor of social life and a primary filter of psychic perception. Hume's "theater of the mind," Adam Smith's "impartial spectator," and Diderot's "tableaux" are all invoked by theorists to describe a process whereby the private individual comes to internalize theatrical logic and apprehend the self as other. To them theatricality is a critical mechanism of modern subjectivity but one that needs to be concealed if the subject's stability is to be maintained. Finding that much of this discussion about the "Age of the Spectator" has been conducted without reference to the play texts or actual theatrical practice, Freeman turns to drama and discovers a dynamic model of identity based on eighteenth-century conceptualizations of character. In contrast to the novel, which cultivated psychological tensions between private interiority and public show, dramatic characters in the eighteenth century experienced no private thoughts. The theater of the eighteenth century was not a theater of absorption but rather a theater of interaction, where what was monitored was not the depth of character, as in the novel, but the arc of a genre over the course of a series of discontinuous acts. In a genre-by-genre analysis of plays about plays, tragedy, comedies of manners, humours, and intrigue, and sentimental comedy, Freeman offers an interpretive account of eighteenth-century drama and its cultural work and demonstrates that by deploying an alternative model of identity, theater marked a site of resistance to the rise of the subject and to the ideological conformity enforced through that identity formation.
Download or read book English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century 1642 1780 written by George Henry Nettleton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Roxolana in European Literature History and Culture written by Galina I. Yermolenko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is the first book-length scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana in the European imagination. Roxolana, or "Hurrem Sultan," was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made an unprecedented career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Her influence on Ottoman affairs generated legends in many a European country. The essays gathered here represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy; the contributors view Roxolana as a transnational figure that reflected the shifting European attitudes towards "the Other," and they investigate her image in a wide variety of sources, ranging from early modern historical chronicles, dramas and travel writings, to twentieth-century historical novels and plays. Also included are six European source texts featuring Roxolana, here translated into modern English for the first time. Importantly, this collection examines Roxolana from both Western and Eastern European perspectives; source material is taken from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Poland, and Ukraine. The volume is an important contribution to the study of early modern transnationalism, cross-cultural exchange, and notions of identity, the Self, and the Other.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment written by Elizabeth Kraft and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume highlights the variety of forms comedy took in England, with reference to developments in Europe, particularly France, during the European Enlightenment. It argues that comedy in this period is characterized by wit, satire, and humor, provoking both laughter and sympathetic tears. Comic expression in the Enlightenment reflects continuities and engagements with the comedy of previous eras; it is also noted for new forms and preoccupations engendered by the cultural, philosophical, and political concerns of the time, including democratizing revolutions, increasing secularization, and growing emphasis on individualism. Discussions emphasize the period's stage comedy and acknowledge comic expression in various forms of print media including the emerging literary form we now know as the novel. Contributions from scholars reflect a wide variety of interests in the field of 18th-century studies, and the inclusion of a generous number of illustrations throughout demonstrates that the period's visual culture was also an important part of the Enlightenment comic landscape. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to Enlightenment comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.
Download or read book Cutting Edges written by James E. Gill and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in Cutting Edges examine English satire of the eighteenth century from various theory-based postmodern perspectives. Some examine little-known works that postmodern concerns, such as the role of women and the problems of authorship, have rendered especially interesting; others reconsider familiar works in terms of the latest critical issues. The justification for these investigations is that both satire and postmodern methods are extremely skeptical and acutely aware that language is always ironic - always pointing to the gap between signifier and signified. The approaches in this book include those associated with deconstruction, reception theory, Marxist criticism, the new historicism, and various feminist criticisms, and with such theorists as Derrida, Bakhtin, Goux, and Luhmann. While most of the major figures of eighteenth-century satire - Butler, Rochester, Swift, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Sterne, and Johnson - are represented here, so too are many other interesting writers - Thomas Shadwell, Fannie Burney, Mary Davys, and Elizabeth Hamilton, to name but a few.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Enlightenment written by Margaret K. Powell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hair, or lack of it, is one the most significant identifiers of individuals in any society. In Antiquity, the power of hair to send a series of social messages was no different. This volume covers nearly a thousand years of history, from Archaic Greece to the end of the Roman Empire, concentrating on what is now Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Among the key issues identified by its authors is the recognition that in any given society male and female hair tend to be opposites (when male hair is generally short, women's is long); that hair is a marker of age and stage of life (children and young people have longer, less confined hairstyles; adult hair is far more controlled); hair can be used to identify the 'other' in terms of race and ethnicity but also those who stand outside social norms such as witches and mad women. The chapters in A Cultural History of Hair in Antiquity cover the following topics: religion and ritualized belief, self and society, fashion and adornment, production and practice, health and hygiene, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and social status, and cultural representations.
