Author : David J. Lake
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 30,38 MB
Release : 1975-07-03
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 052120741X
This book sets out to solve by statistics the problems of disputed authorship that surround the work of Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton. Among other things, Dr Lake shows that there is 99 per cent statistical confidence for the conclusion that The Puritan and The Revenger's Tragedy were written by Middleton rather than by anyone else alive in the early seventeenth century.
Author : Thomas Middleton
Publisher :
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 36,38 MB
Release : 1653
Category : English drama
ISBN :
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.
Author : Thomas Middleton
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 179 pages
File Size : 15,21 MB
Release : 2014-07-03
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1408144603
One of the great Renaissance playwrights, Middleton wrote tragedies essentially different from either Marlowe's or Shakespeare's, being wittier than the former and more grittily ironic than the latter. The genre of 'citizen tragedy' came into its own in the eighteenth century, but Middleton can claim to have created it: Bianca, wife of a middling commercial agent, arouses the lust of the Duke of Florence and becomes his mistress, first secretly, then openly and finally, after her husband has been seduced by the scheming Lady Livia and stabbed by Livia's brother, the Duke's wife. Livia plots her revenge, and the play ends with a banquet and a masque that are a triumph of black farce. Middleton's powerful, psychologically complex female characters and his clear-sighted analysis of misogyny are bound to impress today's audiences, but it is the pervasive irony - cynicism, even - with which he dissects the motivations of both oppressor and victim that makes him so eerily modern.
Author : Raphael Lyne
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 23,92 MB
Release : 2007-02-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0191532797
Shakespeare's Late Work is a detailed reading of the plays written at the end of Shakespeare's career, centring on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Unlike many previous studies it considers all the late work, including Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the revised Folio version of King Lear, and even what can be ascertained about the lost Cardenio. From this broadened canon emerge signs of a distinct identity for the late work. Lyne explores how Shakespeare sets great store in grand principles - faith in God, love of family, reverence for monarchs, and belief in theatrical representations of truth. However, there is also a ubiquitous and structuring irony whereby such principles are questioned and doubted. Audiences and readers are left with a difficult but empowering decision whether to believe, or to question, or to accommodate both faith and scepticism. Alongside this interest in the new and characteristically 'late' qualities of this phase in Shakespeare's career, Shakespeare's Late Work puts it in a wider cultural context. A chapter on the collaborations and broader dramatic relationships with John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton illuminates how Shakespeare's canon interacts with other writing of its time. A chapter on how the late work revisits and reconsiders themes from earlier plays shows that continuity needs to be remembered alongside novelty. Overall this is an introduction to the key works of this period which advances a new reading of them. They emerge as fascinating and dazzling explorations of their potential and their limitations.
Author : Gary Taylor
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 1184 pages
File Size : 34,28 MB
Release : 2007-11-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0191568554
Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture is not only a companion to The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, which every scholar of Renaissance literature will find indispensable. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the book in early modern Europe. The book is divided into two parts. The first part, on 'The Culture', situates Middleton within an historical and theoretical overview of early modern textual production, reproduction, circulation, and reception. An introductory essay by Gary Taylor ('The Order of Persons') surveys lists of persons written by or connected to Middleton, using the complex relationship between textual and social orders to trace the evolution of textual culture in England during the 'Middleton century' (1580-1679). Ten original essays then focus on Middleton's connections to different aspects of textual culture in that century: authorship (by MacD. P. Jackson), manuscripts (Harold Love), legal texts (Edward Geiskes), censorship (Richard Burt), printing (Adrian Weiss), visual texts (John Astington), music (Andrew Sabol), stationers and living authors (Cyndia Clegg), posthumous publishing (Maureen Bell), and early readers (John Jowett). The second part, 'The Texts', supplies the documentation for claims made in the first part. This includes detailed evidence for the canon and chronology of Middleton's works in all genres, greatly extending previous scholarship, and using the latest corpus-based attribution techniques. A full editorial apparatus is supplied for each item in The Collected Works: an Introduction, which summarizes and extends previous scholarship, is followed by textual notes, recording substantive departures from the control-text, variants between early texts, press-variants, discussions of emendations, and (for plays) an exact transcription of all original stage directions. Cross-references make it easy to move between the two volumes. This authoritative account of the early texts includes some extraordinarily complicated cases, which have never before been systematically collated: 'Hence, all you vain delights' (the most popular song lyric from the Renaissance stage), The Two Gates of Salvation, The Peacemaker, and A Game at Chess (the most complex editorial problem in early modern drama, with eight extant texts and numerous reports of the early performances).
Author : Alexander Leggatt
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 14,53 MB
Release : 2014-06-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317871456
The most important period in the history of English drama is revealed in Alexander Leggatt's challenging account. The author considers English drama from the beginning of Shakespeare's career to the restoration of Charles II. Focusing on Shakespeare and the development of his art, he examines all his major contemporaries: Jonson, Middleton, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher and Ford. He combines close analysis of specific plays with a broader look at trends within drama.
Author : John Berryman
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 39,4 MB
Release : 2000-12-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 146680811X
Edited by John Haffenden With a Preface by Robert Giroux John Berryman, one of America's most talented modern poets, was winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs and the National Book Award for His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. He gained a reputation as an innovator whose bold literary adventures were tempered by exacting discipline. Berryman was also an active, prolific, and perceptive critic whose own experience as a major poet served to his advantage. Berryman was a protégé of Mark Van Doren, the great Shakespearean scholar, and the Bard's work remained one of his most abiding passions--he would devote a lifetime to writing about it. His voluminous writings on the subject have now been collected and edited by John Haffenden.
Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 23,22 MB
Release : 2016-04-04
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0393614751
A tragedy that evokes both pity and terror—now in a thoroughly revised and updated Norton Critical Edition. The Norton Critical Edition is again based on the First Folio (1623), the only authoritative text of the play. The volume includes a revised introduction and new annotations and textual notes. The Second Edition also includes the innovative feature “The Actors’ Gallery,” which presents famous actors and actresses—among them David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Ian McKellen, Hira Mikijirô, Patrick Stewart, and Kate Fleetwood—reflecting on their roles in major productions of Macbeth for stage and screen. “Sources and Contexts” provides readers with an understanding of Macbeth’s origins in earlier texts, specifically the works of the Roman playwright Seneca, the Tudor historian Raphael Holinshed, and the medieval drama The Slaughter of the Innocents and the Death of Herod. Contexts for the play include contemporary debates on predestination versus free will (Martin Luther versus Erasmus), witchcraft as fiction or fact (Reginald Scott versus King James I), the ethics of regicide (an Elizabethan homily versus Jan de Mariana, S.J.), and the ethics of equivocation (Henry Garnet, S.J., versus—new to the Second Edition—Sir Edward Coke). Eight carefully chosen essays represent four hundred years of critical and theatrical interpretation. Contributors include Simon Forman, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Harry Levin, Stephen Orgel, Peter Holland, and, presenting the latest arguments on the authorship controversy, Gary Taylor. Finally, an engaging new selection of Macbeth’s “Afterlives” includes excerpts from Giuseppi Verdi’s Macbeth and related letters, Eugene Ionesco’s Macbett (1972), Bill Cain’s Equivocation (2009), and more. This edition also provides a list of online and print resources.
Author : Anthony W. Johnson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 447 pages
File Size : 42,85 MB
Release : 2016-10-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 131716329X
Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences? And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship, theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights’ professional and linguistic networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies. In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances of hall playhouses, court masques, women’s drama, country-house theatricals, and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.
Author : Gary Taylor
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 1185 pages
File Size : 16,37 MB
Release : 2007-11-22
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0198185707
A comprehensive companion to 'The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton', providing detailed introductions to and full editorial apparatus for the works themselves as well as a wealth of information about Middleton's historical and literary context.
