Download or read book Early Modern Theatricality written by Henry S. Turner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.
Download or read book The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China written by Ling Hon Lam and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.
Download or read book Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland written by Mr John J McGavin and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland analyses narrative accounts of public theatricality in late medieval and early-modern Scottish culture (pre-1645). Literary texts such as journal, memoir and chronicles reveal a complex spectatorship in which eye witness, textual witness and the imagination interconnect. The narrators represent a broad variety of public actions as theatrical: included are instances of assault and assassination, petition, clerical interrogation, dissent, preaching, play and display, the performance of identity and the spectatorship of tourism. Varying influences of personal experience, oral tradition, and existing written record colour the narratives. Discernible also are those rhetorical and generic forms which witnesses employ to give a comprehensible shape to events. Narratives of theatricality prove central for understanding early Scottish culture since they record moments of contact between those in power and those without it; they show how participants aimed to influence both present spectators and the witness of history; they reveal the contested nature of ambiguous public genres, and they point up the pleasures and responsibilities of spectatorship. McGavin demonstrates that early Scottish culture is revealed as much in its processes of witnessing as in that which it claims to witness. Although the book's emphasis is on the early modern period, its study of chronicle narratives takes it back from the period of their composition (predominantly 15th and 16th century) to earlier medieval events.
Download or read book Performance and Religion in Early Modern England written by Matthew J. Smith and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture. Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures. Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.
Download or read book Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater written by Ronda Arab and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.
Download or read book How the World Became a Stage written by William Egginton and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Double Helix written by Henry S. Turner and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English literature.
Download or read book The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China written by Chun Mei and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural fascination with and imagination of theater has long been overlooked as an important historical and literary context for reading Water Margin and Journey to the West. This study focuses on the concept of “the theatrical” to read those novels and their commentaries. Imbued with performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship, the early modern theatrical novel borrowed heavily from theater to conflate the theatrical and the real, juggle theatrical roles, persons, and identities, and contest orthodoxies by challenging and appropriating sites of control and authority. This study showcases the theatrical novel’s unique position as a new form of literati self-representation in response to the destabilizing social and political forces of early modern China.
Download or read book Drama Performance and Debate written by Jan Bloemendal and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern theatre was a visual matter, even though the authors wrote plays which were mainly meant to be read. But whether they wrote their plays to have them performed or not, authors could use comedies, tragi-comedies or tragedies to influence public opinion, to make a statement in a debate, or to convey explicit or implicit lessons that they carried out or had carried out by linguistic, rhetorical and theatrical means. How explicit they were in expressing their views depended on the characters of the authors or the circumstances in which they wrote. Questions regarding the opinion-forming and opinion-following functions of theatre, the means by which authors and theatre makers expressed their ideas, and the role of theatre and plays in public debate are discussed from various angles. Such questions refer not only to ‘literary’ plays, but also to other forms of theatrical event, such as royal entrances. Contributors include: Imre Bésanger, Hartmut Beyer, Stijn Bussels, Jean-Frédéric Chevalier, Verena Demoed, Arjan van Dixhoorn, Ron Gruijters, Jelle Koopmans, Frans-Willem Korsten, Katell Lavéant, Hubert Meeus, Marco Prandoni, and Helmar Schramm.
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 Theatricality written by Tracy C. Davis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of specially-commissioned, accessible, essays explores that element of performance theory known as theatricality. Six case studies use historically specific circumstances to illustrate how and why the concept of theatricality was and is used. Topics discussed include early use of the term; employment of 'theatricality' by a number of other disciplines to describe events; non-Western interpretation of theatricality; and its use when discussing and analyzing political and cultural events and philosophies. The book provides a first-step guide for those discovering the complex yet rewarding world of performance theory.
Download or read book Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England written by Paola Pugliatti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2003. In this new socio-cultural study of the history of the theatre in early modern England, author Paola Pugliatti investigates the question of why, in the Tudor and early Stuart period, unregulated and unlicensed theatrical activities were equated by the English law to unregulated and unlicensed begging. Starting with English vagrancy statutes and in particular from the fact that, from 1545 on, players were listed as vagrants, the book discusses from an entirely new perspective the reasons for the equation, in the early modern mind, of beggary with performing. Pugliatti identifies in players' aptitude for disguise and in the fear raised by their proteiform skills the issues which encouraged the assimilation of beggars and players; she argues that at the core of provisions against vagrancy was an attempt to marginalize people who, because of their instability in location and role (that is, in their theatrical quintessence), were seen as embodying potential for subversion. Placing the topic in a European context and relying on the reading of primary documents in several languages, Pugliatti discusses efforts to control beggary from Justinian's Codex to seventeenth-century statutes, locates the origin of anti-vagrancy and antitheatrical writings in anxieties about idleness and disguise, and analyzes the ways in which various kinds of representation demonized both beggars and players. Finally, by carefully distinguishing between the traditions of rogue pamphlets, conny-catching pamphlets and the picaresque, she offers fresh readings of a number of texts which appear to have been entirely disregarded by recent scholarship, such as pamphlets by Walker, Harman, Greene and Dekker.
Download or read book Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage written by Professor Peter Hyland and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays, and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study Peter Hyland considers a range of practical issues related to the performance of disguise. He goes on to examine various conceptual issues that provide a background to theatrical disguise (the relation of self and "other", the meaning of mask and performance). He looks at many disguise plays under three broad headings. He considers moral issues (the almost universal association of disguise with "evil"); social issues (sumptuary legislation, clothing, and the theatre, and constructions of class, gender and national or racial identity); and aesthetic issues (disguise as an emblem of theatre, and the significance of disguise for the dramatic artist). The study serves to examine the significant ways in which disguise devices have been used in early modern drama in England.
Download or read book The English Renaissance Stage written by Henry S. Turner and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2006-02-23 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability written by Genevieve Love and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.
Download or read book Law as Performance written by Julie Stone Peters and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, --as it still does today.
Download or read book The Culture of Capital written by Henry Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading literary critics and historians reassess one of the defining features of early modern England -the idea of "capital." The collection reevaluates the different aspects of the concept amidst the profound changes of the period.
