The School of Abuse, 1579


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Shakespeare's Theater


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Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook brings together in one volume the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater. A collection of the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater. Includes attacks on the stage by moralists, defences by actors and playwrights, letters by magistrates, mayors and aldermen of London, and extracts from legislation. Demonstrates just how heated debates about the theater became in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A general introduction and short prefaces to each piece situate the writers and debates in the literary, social, political and religious history of the time. Brings together in one volume texts that would otherwise be hard to locate. Student-friendly - uses modern spelling and includes vocabulary glosses and annotation.




Reader in Comedy


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This unique anthology presents a selection of over seventy of the most important historical essays on comedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span it traces the development of comic theory, highlighting the relationships between comedy, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and other arts and genres. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to the twenty-first century, in which special attention has been paid to writings since the start of the twentieth century. Reader in Comedy is arranged in five sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts from the period: * Antiquity and the Middle Ages * The Renaissance * Restoration to Romanticism * The Industrial Age * The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries Among the many authors included are: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Donatus, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, Trissino, Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Battista Guarini, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Paul Richter, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson, Constance Rourke, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Simon Critchley and Michael North. As the selection demonstrates, from Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, comedy has attracted the attention of serious thinkers. Bringing together diverse theories of comedy from across the ages, the Reader reveals that, far from being peripheral, comedy speaks to the most pragmatic aspects of human life.




The Trouble with Literature


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This book, based on the Clarendon Lectures in English for 2017, argues that the literature of the English Reformation marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness. But instead of arguing that the Reformation fostered English literature, as scholars have often done, Victoria Kahn claims that literature helped undo the Reformation, with implications for both poetry and belief. Ultimately, literature in the Reformation is one vehicle by which religious belief was itself transformed into a human artifact, whether we understand this as a poetic artifact or a mental fiction. This transformation in turn helped produce the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, with its emphasis on our experience of non-cognitive pleasure in the work of art, and the modern formalist definition of literature, according to which—in the words of one critic—'literature solves no problems and saves no souls.' This modern definition of literature, in short, has a history, this history is intertwined with the problem of belief, and by returning to the fraught years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in England, we can come to a new understanding of how the trouble with literature has shaped our discipline. The first lecture contrasts modern and early modern understandings of literature and literariness. The second and third lectures focus on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. The fourth lecture treats the work of Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and J.M. Coetzee.







Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion


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"What if at night at the theaters in Elizabethan England more closely resembled attending a rugby match than sitting in a dark, silent audience, passively witnessing the action on the stage, or closer to going to a rock concert than sitting in front of a large or small screen, quietly and distantly absorbing a film or television drama? In this book, West proposes a new account of what happened in the playhouses of Shakespeare's time, and the kind of participatory entertainment expected by both the actors and the audience. Combining the precision of a philologist and the imagination of a philosopher, West performs careful readings of premodern figures of speech--including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting--still in use today, but whose meanings for Elizabethan players, playgoers, and writers have diverged in subtle ways in our era. Playing itself was not restricted to the confines of the actors on the stage but pertained just as much to the audience in a collaborative rather than individualized theater experience, more corporeal, tactile, and active, rather than purely receptive and visual. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears--these and more contributed to both the verbal and physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption,all within the confines of the playhouse. West's account of the experience of the playhouse shows more affinity--and continuity--with more raucous, unruly medieval drama than previous literary critics have allowed. It will be of interest to a wide audience, actors, directors, and scholars included"




The Memory Arts in Renaissance England


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Anthology of a selection of early modern works on memory.




The School of Abuse


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Men in Women's Clothing


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Laura Levine examines the ways in which Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson addressed a generation's anxieties about gender and the stage and identifies the way the same 'magical thinking' informed documents we much more readily associate with extreme forms of cultural paranoia.