Experiencing Drama In The English Renaissance

Author : Akihiro Yamada
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2017-04-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351764469

Get Book

Experiencing Drama in the English Renaissance by Akihiro Yamada Pdf

This book investigates the complex interactions, through experiencing drama, of readers and audiences in the English Renaissance. Around 1500 an absolute majority of population was illiterate. Henry VIII’s religious reformation changed this cultural structure of society. ‘The Act for the Advancement of True Religion’ of 1543, which prohibited the people belonging to the lower classes of society as well as women from reading the Bible, rather suggests that there already existed a number of these folks actively engaged in reading. The Act did not ban the works of Chaucer and Gower and stories of men’s lives – good reading for them. The successive sovereigns’ educational policies also contributed to rising literacy. This trend was speeded up by London’s growing population which invited the rise of commercial playhouses since 1567. Every citizen saw on average about seven performances every year: that is, about three per cent of London’s population saw a performance a day. From 1586 onwards merchants’ appearance in best-seller literature began to increase while stage representation of reading/writing scenes also increased and stimulated audiences towards reading. This was spurred by standardisation of the printing format of playbooks in the early 1580s and play-minded readers went to playbooks, eventually to create a class of playbook readers. Late in the 1590s, at last, playbooks matched with prose writings in ratio to all publications. Parts I and II of this book discuss these topics in numerical terms as much as possible and Part III discusses some monumental characteristics of contemporary readers of Chapman, Ford, Marston and Shakespeare.

Author : Kristen Deiter
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2011-02-23
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781135894061

Get Book

The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama by Kristen Deiter Pdf

The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama historicizes the Tower of London's evolving meanings in English culture alongside its representations in twenty-four English history plays, 1579-c.1634, by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. While Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I fashioned the Tower as a showplace of royal authority, magnificence, and entertainment, many playwrights of the time revealed the Tower's instability as a royal symbol and represented it, instead, as an emblem of opposition to the crown and as a bodily and spiritual icon of non-royal English identity.

Author : Sophie Chiari
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2022-04-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000569919

Get Book

The Experience of Disaster in Early Modern English Literature by Sophie Chiari Pdf

This book addresses the concept of ‘disaster’ through a variety of literary texts dating back to the early modern period. While Shakespeare’s age, which was an era of colonisation, certainly marked a turning point in men and women’s relations with nature, the present times seem to announce the advent of environmental justice in spite of the massive ecological destructions that have contributed to reshape our planet. Between then and now, a whole history of climatic disasters and of their artistic depictions needs to be traced. The literary representations of eco-catastrophes, in particular, have consistently fashioned the English identity and led to the progress of science and the ‘advancement of learning’. They have also obliged us to adapt, recycle and innovate. How could the destructive process entailed by ecological disasters be represented on the page and thereby transformed into a creative process encouraging meditation, preservation and resilience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? To this question, this book offers nuanced, contextualised and perceptive answers. Divided into three main sections ‘Extreme Conditions’, ‘Tempestuous Skies’, and ‘Biblical Calamities,' it deals with the major environmental issues of our time through the prism of early modern culture and literature.

Author : Kent Cartwright
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2022-02-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198868897

Get Book

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment by Kent Cartwright Pdf

Introduction -- Clowns, fools, and folly -- Structural doubleness and repetition -- Place, being, and agency -- The manifestation of desire -- The return from the dead -- Ending and wondering.

Author : Hannah August
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2022-04-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000563115

Get Book

Playbooks and their Readers in Early Modern England by Hannah August Pdf

This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama’s most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence.

Author : Helen Hackett
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2012-10-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780857723369

Get Book

A Short History of English Renaissance Drama by Helen Hackett Pdf

Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.

Author : Jean-Christophe Mayer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2018-09-06
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781107138339

Get Book

Shakespeare's Early Readers by Jean-Christophe Mayer Pdf

This is the first dedicated account of the ways in which Shakespeare's texts were read in the two centuries after they were produced. A close examination of rare, often unpublished material offers a reconsideration of the role of readers in the history of Shakespeare's rise to fame.

Author : Thomas Cartelli
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2015-08-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781512801569

Get Book

Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience by Thomas Cartelli Pdf

This study explores the structure of psychological, social and political exchanges that were negotiated between audiences and plays in Elizabethan public theatres in a period ostensibly dominated by Shakespeare, but strongly rooted in Marlowe.

Author : Ted Tregear
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2023-03-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192694799

Get Book

Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 by Ted Tregear Pdf

Between 1599 and 1601, no fewer than five anthologies appeared in print with extracts from Shakespeare's works. Some featured whole poems, while others chose short passages from his poems and plays, gathered alongside lines on similar topics by his rivals and contemporaries. Appearing midway through his career, these anthologies marked a critical moment in Shakespeare's life. They testify to the reputation he had established as a poet and playwright by the end of the sixteenth century. In extracting passages from their contexts, though, they also read Shakespeare in ways that he might have imagined being read. After all, this was how early modern readers were taught to treat the texts they read, selecting choice excerpts and copying them into their notebooks. Taking its cue from these anthologies, Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 offers new readings of the formative works of Shakespeare's first decade in print, from Venus and Adonis (1593) to Hamlet (1603). It illuminates a previously neglected period in Shakespeare's career, what it calls his 'anthology period'. It investigates what these anthologies made of Shakespeare, and what he made of being anthologized. And it shows how, from the early 1590s, his works were inflected by the culture of commonplacing and anthologizing in which they were written, and in which Shakespeare, no less than his readers, was schooled. In this book, Ted Tregear explores how Shakespeare appealed to the reading habits of his contemporaries, inviting and frustrating them in turn. Shakespeare, he argues, used the practice of anthologizing to open up questions at the heart of his poems and plays: questions of classical literature and the schoolrooms in which it was taught; of English poetry and its literary inheritance; of poetry's relationship with drama; and of the afterlife he and his works might win—at least in parts.

Author : Bruce R. Smith
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2014-07-14
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781400859399

Get Book

Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500-1700 by Bruce R. Smith Pdf

Unlike the contrast between the sacred and the taboo, the opposition of "comic" and "tragic" is not a way of categorizing experience that we find in cultures all over the world or even at different periods in Western civilization. Though medieval writers and readers distinguished stories with happy endings from stories with unhappy endings, it was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--fifteen hundred years after Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, and Terence had last been performed in the theaters of the Roman Empire--that tragedy and comedy regained their ancient importance as ways of giving dramatic coherence to human events. Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage charts that rediscovery, not in the pages of scholars' books, but on the stages of England's schools, colleges, inns of court, and royal court, and finally in the public theaters of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century London. In bringing to imaginative life the scripts, eyewitness accounts, and financial records of these productions, Bruce Smith turns to the structuralist models that anthropologists have used to explain how human beings as social creatures organize and systematize experience. He sets in place the critical, physical, and social structures in which sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Englishmen watched productions of classical comedy and classical tragedy. Seen in these three contexts, these productions play out a conflict between classical and medieval ways of understanding and experiencing comedy's interplay between satiric and romantic impulses and tragedy's clash between individuals and society. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : Jonathan Walker
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780810135031

Get Book

Site Unscene by Jonathan Walker Pdf

Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers’ sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama’s nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage. Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama. Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies.

Author : Hristomir A. Stanev
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2016-04-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317057161

Get Book

Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625) by Hristomir A. Stanev Pdf

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Hristomir Stanev argues, ideas about the senses became part of a dramatic and literary tradition in England, concerned with the impact of metropolitan culture. Drawing upon an archive of early modern dramatic and prose writings, and on recent interdisciplinary studies of sensory perception, Stanev here investigates representations of the five senses in Jacobean plays in relationship to metropolitan environments. He traces the significance of under-examined concerns about urban life that emerge in micro-histories of performance and engage the (in)voluntary and sometimes pre-rational participation of the five senses. With a dominant focus on sensation, he argues further for drama’s particular place in expanding the field of social perception around otherwise less tractable urban phenomena, such as suburban formation, environmental and noise pollution, epidemic disease, and the impact of built-in city space. The study focuses on ideas about the senses on stage but also, to the extent possible, explores surviving accounts of the sensory nature of playhouses. The chapters progress from the lower order of the senses (taste and smell) to the higher (hearing and vision) before considering the anomalous sense of touch in Platonic terms. The plays considered include five city comedies, a romance, and two historical tragedies; playwrights whose work is covered include Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, Fletcher, Dekker, and Middleton. Ultimately, Stanev highlights the instrumental role of sensory flux and instability in recognizing the uneasy manner in which the London writers, and perhaps many of their contemporaries, approached the rapidly evolving metropolitan environment during the reign of King James I.

Author : Harriet Phillips
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2019-06-27
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781108482271

Get Book

Nostalgia in Print and Performance, 1510–1613 by Harriet Phillips Pdf

Uncovers the importance of popular literature in promoting and shaping medieval nostalgia in early modern England.

Author : David M Bevington,Katharine Eisaman Maus,Eric Rasmussen,Lars Engle
Publisher : Humanities-Ebooks
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2014-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781847603043

Get Book

English Renaissance Drama by David M Bevington,Katharine Eisaman Maus,Eric Rasmussen,Lars Engle Pdf

Author : Eugene M. Waith
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0874133254

Get Book

Patterns and Perspectives in English Renaissance Drama by Eugene M. Waith Pdf

These essays bring attention to the designs that the English Renaissance playwrights imposed on their work. Among the patterns explored are those inspired by the literature, drama, or poetics of classical times and visual patterns derived from traditions of stage presentation.