The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama


Book Description

The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama is the first new collection of the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in over a century. This volume comprises seventeen accessible, thoroughly glossed, modernized play-texts, intermingling a wide range of unfamiliar works—including the anonymous Look About You, Massinger’s The Picture, Heminge’s The Fatal Contract, Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London, and Greene’s James IV—with more familiar works such as Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Each play is edited by a different leading scholar in the field of early modern studies, bringing specific expertise and context to the chosen play-text. With an unprecedented variety of plays, and critical introductions that focus on the diversity and strangeness of different early modern approaches to the artistic and commercial enterprise of play-making, The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama will offer vital new perspectives on early modern drama for scholars, students, and performers alike.




Early Modern Academic Drama


Book Description

Contributors to this collection argue for the importance of academic drama as a site of cultural production in England from 1500 to 1700. They explore how these plays address various aspects of culture, including the relationship between the academy and the state, the tensions between humanism and religious reform, the social profits and economic liabilities of formal education, and the increasing involvement of universities in the commercial market, among other issues.




The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama


Book Description

"Each play is prefaced by an introductory headnote discussing the thematic focus of the play and its textual history, and is cross-referenced to other plays of the period that relate thematically and generically."--BOOK JACKET.




The Routledge Drama Anthology


Book Description

This is a compilation of the key movements in the history of modern theatre. Each of the book's parts comprises full reproductions of the plays that defined the period and key critical writings that inform and contextualise their reading.




Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater


Book Description

Lauren Robertson's original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater's representational practices, Robertson uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of playgoing experience in this period. Doubt was not merely the purview of Hamlet and other onstage characters, but was in fact constitutive of spectators' imaginative participation in performance. Within a culture in the midst of extreme epistemological upheaval, the commercial theater licensed spectators' suspension among opposed possibilities, transforming dubiety itself into exuberantly enjoyable, spectacular show. Robertson shows that the playhouse was a site for the entertainment of uncertainty in a double sense: its pleasures made the very trial of unknowing possible.




Early Modern Theatricality


Book Description

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.




Civic Performance


Book Description

Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London brings together a group of essays from across multiple fields of study that examine the socio-cultural, political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of pageantry in sixteenth and seventeenth-century London. This collection engages with modern interest in the spectacle and historical performances of pageantry and entertainments, including royal entries, progresses, coronation ceremonies, Lord Mayor's Shows, and processions. Through a discussion of the extant texts, visual records, archival material, and emerging projects in the digital humanities, the chapters elucidate the forms in which the period itself recorded its public rituals, pageantry, and ephemeral entertainments. The diversity of approaches contained in these chapters reflects the collaborative nature of pageantry and civic entertainments, as well as the broad socio-cultural resonances of this form of drama, and in doing so offers a study that is multi-faceted and wide-ranging, much like civic performance itself. Ideal for scholars of Early Modern global politics, economics, and culture; literary and performance studies; print culture; and the digital humanities, Civic Performance casts a new lens on street pageantry and entertainments in the historically and culturally significant locus of Early Modern London.




Early English Drama


Book Description

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook


Book Description

A groundbreaking compilation of the key movements in the history of modern theatre. Each of the book’s parts comprises full reproductions of the plays that defined the period and key critical writings that inform and contextualise their reading. "Here is an anthology of plays and criticism that all teachers of drama should take seriously. The fresh angles and approaches the volume offers on topics such as naturalism, the historical avant-garde, and breakthrough works by innovative performance artists (e.g., Laurie Anderson, SuAndi) all argue in favor of this collection as required reading in courses on modern stagecraft." CHOICE, Feb 2011




The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama


Book Description

How does our understanding of early modern performance, culture and identity change when we decentre Shakespeare? And how might a more inclusive approach to early modern drama help enable students to discuss a range of issues, including race and gender, in more productive ways? Underpinned by these questions, this collection offers a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on drama in Shakespeare's England, mapping the variety of approaches to the context and work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By paying attention to repertory, performance in and beyond playhouses, modes of performance, and lost and less-studied plays, the handbook reshapes our critical narratives about early modern drama. Chapters explore early modern drama through a range of cultural contexts and approaches, from material culture and emotion studies to early modern race work and new directions in disability and trans studies, as well as contemporary performance. Running through the collection is a shared focus on contemporary concerns, with contributors exploring how race, religion, environment, gender and sexuality animate 16th- and 17th-century drama and, crucially, the questions we bring to our study, teaching and research of it. The volume includes a ground-breaking assessment of the chronology of early modern drama, a survey of resources and an annotated bibliography to assist researchers as they pursue their own avenues of inquiry. Combining original research with an account of the current state of play, The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama will be an invaluable resource both for experienced scholars and for those beginning work in the field.