Author : A. Zucker
Publisher : Springer
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 31,84 MB
Release : 2006-10-30
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0230601618
This book redefines the plays and theatrical culture of the years 1625 to 1642 as something more than simply post-Shakespearean in character. Scholars reveal the drama's mixture of political engagement, urbane cosmopolitanism, and commercial ingenuity. They urge us to recalibrate our histories to account for the innovations of the Caroline period.
Author : Joanne Rochester
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 37,81 MB
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1351898183
The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly staged plays-within and other metatheatrical inserts. Such works present fictionalized spectators as well as performers, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of the interpretive work of a spectator as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about early modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. This study examines on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Philip Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Each play presents a different form of metatheatrical inset, from the plays-within of The Roman Actor (1626), to the masques-within of The City Madam (1632) to the titular miniature portrait of The Picture (1629), moving thematically from spectator interpretations of dramatic performance, the visual spectacle of the masque to staged 'readings' of static visual art. All three forms present a dramatization of the process of examination, and allow an analysis of Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.
Author : Subha Mukherji
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 34,72 MB
Release : 2019-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 3110661993
A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "reads" the "blind spot" of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "community" into print.
Author : Amy Lidster
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 18,42 MB
Release : 2022-03-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1009050028
During the early modern period, the publication process decisively shaped the history play and its reception. Bringing together the methodologies of genre criticism and book history, this study argues that stationers have – through acts of selection and presentation – constructed some remarkably influential expectations and ideas surrounding genre. Amy Lidster boldly challenges the uncritical use of Shakespeare's Folio as a touchstone for the history play, exposing the harmful ways in which this has solidified its parameters as a genre exclusively interested in the lives of English kings. Reframing the Folio as a single example of participation in genre-making, this book illuminates the exciting and diverse range of historical pasts that were available to readers and audiences in the early modern period. Lidster invites us to reappraise the connection between plays on stage and in print, and to reposition playbooks within the historical culture and geopolitics of the book trade.
Author : David McInnis
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 16,56 MB
Release : 2020-06-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1350082732
Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the plays' critical and performance history A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online The blockbuster Tamburlaine plays (1587) instantly established Marlowe's reputation for experimenting with subversive, outrageous and immoral material. The plays follow the meteoric rise of a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord, whose conquests of eastern emperors soon sees him established as the most powerful man in the world. The visual tableaux featured in the plays are iconic. He uses his enemy Bajazeth as a footstool, and has other emperors pull his chariot like horses. He burns the Qur'an on stage. The plays were memorable, too, for how they sounded: they showcased the power and variability of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare would go on to perfect. No history of Shakespeare's theatre is complete without understanding the influence and significance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays. Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader offers the definitive introduction to these plays and new perspectives on these seminal works. It provides an overview of their reception on stage and by critics, and offers fresh insights into the teaching of these plays in the classroom.
Author : Darryll Grantley
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Page : 549 pages
File Size : 37,61 MB
Release : 2013-10-10
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0810880288
British theatre has a greater tradition than any other, having started all the way back in 1311 and still going strong today. But that is too much for one book to cover, so this volume deals with early theatre and has a cut-off date in 1899. Still, this is almost six centuries, centuries during which British theatre not only developed but produced some of the greatest playwrights of all time and anywhere, including obviously Shakespeare but also Marlowe and Shaw. And they wrote some of the finest plays ever, which are known around the world. So there is plenty for this book to cover, just with the playwrights, plays and actors, but it also has information on stagecraft and theatres, as well as the historical and political background. This book has over 1,183 entries in the dictionary section, these being mainly on playwrights and plays, but others as well including managers and critics, and also on specific theatres, legislative acts and some technical jargon. Then there are entries on the different genres, from comedy to tragedy and everything in between. Inevitably, the chronology is quite long as it has a long period to cover and the introduction provides the necessary overview. The Historical Dictionary of Early British Theatre concludes with a pretty massive bibliography. That will be of use to particularly assiduous researchers, but this book itself is a good place to start any research since it covers periods that are far less well-known and documented, and ordinary theatre-goers will also find useful information.
Author : Rafał Borysławski
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 34,76 MB
Release : 2016-08-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1443898546
Laughter is often no laughing matter, and, as such, it deserves continued scholarly attention as a social, cultural and historical phenomenon. This collection of essays is a meeting ground for scholars from several disciplines, including historians, philologists, and scholars of social sciences, to discuss places and roles of laughter in history, in historical narratives, and in cultural anthropology from prehistory to the present. The common foci of the papers gathered in this volume are to examine laughter and its meanings, to reflect on the place of laughter in Western history and literature, to disclose laughter’s manipulative potential in historical and literary narratives, to see it in the light of the concepts of carnivalesque and playfulness, to see it as a reflection of hysterical historicizing, to see its place in comedy, farce, grotesque and irony, and to see it against its broadly understood theoretical, philosophical and psychological aspects. The book will appeal chiefly to an academic readership, including students, historians, literary and cultural scholars, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists.
Author : Asuka Kimura
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 27,2 MB
Release : 2023-01-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1501513893
The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.
Author : Emma Smith
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 31,88 MB
Release : 2016-03-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317034457
Engaging with histories of the book and of reading, as well as with studies of material culture, this volume explores ’popularity’ in early modern English writings. Is ’popular’ best described as a theoretical or an empirical category in this period? How can we account for the gap between modern canonicity and early modern print popularity? How might we weight the evidence of popularity from citations, serial editions, print runs, reworkings, or extant copies? Is something that sells a lot always popular, even where the readership for print is only a small proportion of the population, or does popular need to carry something of its etymological sense of the public, the people? Four initial chapters sketch out the conceptual and evidential issues, while the second part of the book consists of ten short chapters-a ’hit parade’- in which eminent scholars take a genre or a single exemplar - play, romance, sermon, or almanac, among other categories-as a means to articulate more general issues. Throughout, the aim is to unpack and interrogate assumptions about the popular, and to decentre canonical narratives about, for example, the sermons of Donne or Andrewes over Smith, or the plays of Shakespeare over Mucedorus. Revisiting Elizabethan literary culture through the lenses of popularity, this collection allows us to view the subject from an unfamiliar angle-in which almanacs are more popular than sonnets and proclamations more numerous than plays, and in which authors familiar to us are displaced by names now often forgotten.
Author : Matthew Boyd Goldie
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 46,10 MB
Release : 2010-01-31
Category : History
ISBN : 1135272182
A study that uses critical theory to investigate the history of how people have thought about the antipodes - the places and people on the other side of the world - from ancient Greece to present-day literature and digital media.
