Download or read book Fools and Jesters at the English Court written by John Southworth and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fools have been a feature of virtually every recorded culture in the history of civilization, making significant contributions to the development of early theatre and literary drama. This book offers a reign by reign chronicle of English court fools.
Download or read book Fools and Jesters at the English Court written by John Southworth and published by History Press (SC). This book was released on 1998 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fools have been a feature of virtually every recorded culture in the history of civilization, making significant contributions to the development of early theatre and literary drama. This book offers a reign by reign chronicle of English court fools.
Download or read book Fools Are Everywhere written by Beatrice K. Otto and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively work, Beatrice K. Otto takes us on a journey around the world in search of one of the most colorful characters in history—the court jester. Though not always clad in cap and bells, these witty, quirky characters crop up everywhere, from the courts of ancient China and the Mogul emperors of India to those of medieval Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. With a wealth of anecdotes, jokes, quotations, epigraphs, and illustrations (including flip art), Otto brings to light little-known jesters, highlighting their humanizing influence on people with power and position and placing otherwise remote historical figures in a more idiosyncratic, intimate light. Most of the work on the court jester has concentrated on Europe; Otto draws on previously untranslated classical Chinese writings and other sources to correct this bias and also looks at jesters in literature, mythology, and drama. Written with wit and humor, Fools Are Everywhere is the most comprehensive look at these roguish characters who risked their necks not only to mock and entertain but also to fulfill a deep and widespread human and social need.
Download or read book The History of Court Fools written by John Doran and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Four Fools in the Age of Reason written by Dorinda Outram and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unveiling the nearly lost world of the court fools of eighteenth-century Germany, Dorinda Outram shows that laughter was an essential instrument of power. Whether jovial or cruel, mirth altered social and political relations. Outram takes us first to the court of Frederick William I of Prussia, who emerges not only as an administrative reformer and notorious militarist but also as a "master of fools," a ruler who used fools to prop up his uncertain power. The autobiography of the itinerant fool Peter Prosch affords a rare insider’s view of the small courts in Catholic south Germany, Austria, and Bavaria. Full of sharp observations of prelates and princes, the autobiography also records episodes of the extraordinary cruelty for which the German princely courts were notorious. Joseph Fröhlich, court fool in Dresden, presents more appealing facets of foolery. A sharp salesman and hero of the Meissen factories, he was deeply attached to the folk life of fooling. The book ends by tying the growth of Enlightenment skepticism to the demise of court foolery around 1800. Outram’s book is invaluable for giving us such a vivid depiction of the court fool and especially for revealing how this figure can shed new light on the wielding of power in Enlightenment Europe.
Download or read book A Social History of the Fool written by Sandra Billington and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2015-03-19 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is the Fool and what does he mean to us? Pre-1900 scholars thought him a Renaissance fashion, a continental import of note in the British Isles only between 1486 and the 1630s, per his appearances in Shakespeare's plays. However, as Sandra Billington shows in this pioneering study, the Fool has been with us from medieval times and has worn many guises: village idiot and sophisticated comedian, embodiment of Satan and God's own jester. He has managed, as Billington notes, 'to inspire or infect our thinking for at least eight hundred years'.
Download or read book Disability and the Tudors written by Phillipa Vincent Connolly and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2021-11-10 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, how society treated its disabled and infirm can tell us a great deal about the period. Challenged with any impairment, disease or frailty was often a matter of life and death before the advent of modern medicine, so how did a society support the disabled amongst them? For centuries, disabled people and their history have been overlooked - hidden in plain sight. Very little on the infirm and mentally ill was written down during the renaissance period. The Tudor period is no exception and presents a complex, unparalleled story. The sixteenth century was far from exemplary in the treatment of its infirm, but a multifaceted and ambiguous story emerges, where society’s ‘natural fools’ were elevated as much as they were belittled. Meet characters like William Somer, Henry VIII’s fool at court, whom the king depended upon, and learn of how the dissolution of the monasteries contributed to forming an army of ‘sturdy beggars’ who roamed Tudor England without charitable support. From the nobility to the lowest of society, Phillipa Vincent-Connolly casts a light on the lives of disabled people in Tudor England and guides us through the social, religious, cultural, and ruling classes’ response to disability as it was then perceived.
Download or read book Thirteenth Night written by Alan R. Gordon and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 13th century mystery set in Italy whose protagonist is a professor in a school for fools, which trains jesters and magicians. He investigates the murder of a count. A first novel.
Download or read book Clowns Fools and Picaros written by David Robb and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By its very nature the clown, as represented in art, is an interdisciplinary phenomenon. In whichever artform it appears - fiction, drama, film, photography or fine art - it carries the symbolic association of its usage in popular culture, be it ritual festivities, street theatre or circus. The clown, like its extended family of fools, jesters, picaros and tricksters, has a variety of functions all focussed around its status and image of being "other." Frequently a marginalized figure, it provides the foil for the shortcomings of dominant discourse or the absurdities of human behaviour. Clowns, Fools and Picaros represents the latest research on the clown, bringing together for the first time studies from four continents: Europe, America, Africa and Asia. It attempts to ascertain commonalities, overlaps and differences between artistic expressions of the "clownesque" from these various continents and genres, and above all, to examine the role of the clown in our cultures today. This volume is of interest for scholars of political and comic drama, film and visual art as well as scholars of comparative literature and anthropology.
Download or read book Summer s Last Will and Testament written by Thomas Nashe and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This early work by Thomas Nashe was originally published in 1600 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Summer's Last Will and Testament' is an Elizabethan era stage play that broke new ground in the development of English Renaissance drama. Thomas Nashe was born in November 1567. He was an English Elizabethan Pamphleteer, playwright, poet and satirist, but little is known with certainty about his life. Much of the information we have has been inferred from his writings. Nashe's first appearance in print was his preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589), in which he offers a brief definition of art and an overview of contemporary literature. His early exercise in euphuism The Anatomy of Absurdity was published in the same year. From then on Nashe became involved in numerous political and religious causes, including the Martin Marprelate controversy where he sided with the bishops. Nashe offers an important insight into the workings of 16th century English life and his writings will continue to be studied for both their literary content and historical relevance.
Download or read book Fools and Idiots written by Irina Metzler and published by . This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... The book demolishes a number of historiographic myths and stereotypes surrounding intellectual disability in the Middle Ages and suggests new insights with regard to 'fools', jesters and 'idiots'.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Folly written by Sam Hall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare’s drama. The discourse of folly’s wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims – a fool’s truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the sole preserve of professional jesters and garrulous clowns, for it is also apparent on a thematic, conceptual, and formal level in virtually all of his plays. Examining canonical histories, comedies, and tragedies, this study is the first to either contextualize Shakespearean folly within European humanist thought, or to argue that Shakespeare’s philosophy of folly is part of a subterranean strand of Western philosophy, which itself reflects upon the folly of the wise. This strand runs from the philosopher-fool Socrates through to Montaigne and on to Nietzsche, but finds its most sustained expression in the Critical Theory of the mid to late twentieth-century, when the self-destructive potential latent in rationality became an historical reality. This book makes a substantial contribution to the fields of Shakespeare, Renaissance humanism, Critical Theory, and Literature and Philosophy. It illustrates, moreover, how rediscovering the philosophical potential of folly may enable us to resist the growing dominance of instrumental thought in the cultural sphere.
Download or read book Preaching Fools written by Charles L Campbell and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Campbell and Cilliars walk the fine line between the ugliness and beauty of the gospel and challenge readers toward a deeper engagement with its unsettling message.--Angela Dienhart Hancock, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary "Theology Today"
Download or read book A Banquet of Jests and Merry Tales written by Archie Armstrong and published by . This book was released on 1889 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shakespeare the Player written by John Southworth and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-10-21 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Man of the Millennium' he may be but William Shakespeare is a shadowy historical figures. His writings have been analysed exhaustively but much of his life remains a mystery. This controversial biography aims to redress the balance. To his contemporaries, Shakespeare was known not as a playwright but as an actor, yet this has been largely ignored or marginalised by most modern writers. here John Southworth overturns traditional images of the Bard and his work, arguing that Shakespeare cannot be separated from his profession as a player any more than he can be separated from his works. Only by approaching Shakespeare's life from this new angle can we hope to learn or understand anything new about him. Following Shakespeare's life as an actor as he learns his craft and begins work on his own plays, Southworth presents the Bard and his plays in their proper context for the first time. Groundbreaking, contentious and a work of deep scholarship and understanding, 'Shakespeare the Player' should change the way we think about the English language's greatest artist.
Download or read book A Fool s Endeavor written by Janetje Amabilis and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The king is dead, the child princess has been stolen away, and the court jester is left bleeding and drowning in the moat: Castle Acalathoy has been dealt a mortal blow. With the only heir to the throne taken in the night, the fate of the kingdom is sealed. The soldiers have been slaughtered, the knights laid waste, and there is no hero foolish enough to go after the princess.But Jester Lure has survived, and he will not be detoured.Against all odds, the fate of the princess lies in the hands of her personal jester, a peculiar man who hides more than his face under his mask. He has nothing left to lose and no intention of turning back. He, along with a small group of similarly unlikely companions- an apprentice who is merely an extension of his master and a knight driven only by guilt- must risk their lives in a hopeless journey across a dangerous land. Wildlife running havoc, bandits, pale folk with saccharine smiles, and other dangers are waiting along their path. It is them against an unrelenting world, and the group must learn to function together if they plan on surviving. With tension within the group, inexperience, and a lack of even basic weapons, this is easier said than done.It's foolish to believe that they can save the princess from a fate nearly worse than death, but a foolish endeavor is not yet a hopeless one, and their trials have only just begun. For the fate of the princess, for the fate of their lives, and all relying on a foolish endeavor.
Download or read book Emblems in Scotland written by Michael Bath and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emblems in the visual arts use motifs which have meanings, and in Emblems in Scotland Michael Bath, leading authority on Renaissance emblem books, shows how such symbolic motifs address major historical issues of Anglo-Scottish relations, the Reformation of the Church and the Union of the Crowns. Emblems are enigmas, and successive chapters ask for instance: Why does a late-medieval rood-screen show a jester at the Crucifixion? Why did Elizabeth I send Mary Queen of Scots tapestries showing the power of women to build a feminist City of God? Why did a presbyterian minister of Stirling decorate his manse with hieroglyphics? And why in the twentieth-century did Ian Hamilton Finlay publish a collection of Heroic Emblems?