A Study of Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy


Book Description

This study combines a consideration of the general issues affecting Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy with particular comment on plays.




Strangeness in Jacobean Drama


Book Description

Callan Davies presents “strangeness” as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama—one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as “Shakespeare’s late plays,” “tragicomedy,” or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.




Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare's England


Book Description

Hamlin's study provides the first full-scale account of the reception and literary appropriation of ancient scepticism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (c. 1570-1630). Offering abundant archival evidence as well as fresh treatments of Florio's Montaigne and Bacon's career-long struggle with the challenges of epistemological doubt, Hamlin's book explores the deep connections between scepticism and tragedy in plays ranging from Doctor Faustus and Troilus and Cressida to The Tragedy of Mariam , The Duchess of Malfi , and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore .




The Changeling


Book Description

The Changeling is a popular Renaissance tragedy in which the relationship between money, sex, and power is explored. Frequently performed and studied in University courses, it is a key text in the New Mermaids series.




The Spanish Tragedy


Book Description

Reproduction of the original: The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd




Handbook of English Renaissance Literature


Book Description

This handbook of English Renaissance literature serves as a reference for both students and scholars, introducing recent debates and developments in early modern studies. Using new theoretical perspectives and methodological tools, the volume offers exemplary close readings of canonical and less well-known texts from all significant genres between c. 1480 and 1660. Its systematic chapters address questions about editing Renaissance texts, the role of translation, theatre and drama, life-writing, science, travel and migration, and women as writers, readers and patrons. The book will be of particular interest to those wishing to expand their knowledge of the early modern period beyond Shakespeare.




Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare


Book Description

Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare and the establishment of commercial theatres. He identifies in the drama a materialist vision which has its origins in the climate of uncertainty engendered by the rapidly expanding economy of London. His examples range from the economic importance of cuckoldry to the role of stage props as commodities, and the commercial significance of the Troy story in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and he offers new ways of reading English Renaissance drama, by returning the theatre and the plays performed there, to its basis in the material world.




The Revenger's Tragedy


Book Description




Jacobean Private Theatre


Book Description

In this scholarly and entertaining book, first published in 1987, the author tells the story of Jacobean private theatre. Most of the best plays written after 1610, including Shakespeare’s late plays such as The Tempest, were written for the new breed of private playhouses – small, roofed and designed for an aristocratic, literary audience, as opposed to the larger, open-air houses such as the Globe and the Red Bull, catering for a popular, ‘lowbrow’ audience. The author discusses the polarisation of taste and the effect it had on literary criticism and theatre history. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.




Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist


Book Description

Now in a new edition, Lukas Erne's groundbreaking study argues that Shakespeare, apart from being a playwright who wrote theatrical texts for the stage, was also a literary dramatist who produced reading texts for the page. Examining the evidence from early published playbooks, Erne argues that Shakespeare wrote many of his plays with a readership in mind and that these 'literary' texts would have been abridged for the stage because they were too long for performance. The variant early texts of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Hamlet are shown to reveal important insights into the different media for which Shakespeare designed his plays. This revised and updated edition includes a new and substantial preface that reviews and intervenes in the controversy the study has triggered and lists reviews, articles and books which respond to or build on the first edition.