Staging Reform Reforming The Stage

Author : Huston Diehl
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2019-06-07
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781501734083

Get Book

Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage by Huston Diehl Pdf

Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation—a reformed drama—and a producer of Protestant habits of thought—a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.

Author : Glenn Ehrstine
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 420 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9004123539

Get Book

Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern by Glenn Ehrstine Pdf

This study examines the sociocultural context of Bern's ten Reformation plays, authored by Niklaus Manuel and Hans von Rute, and argues that Protestant theater was instrumental in creating cultural community among an urban populace estranged from Catholic tradition.

Author : Mary Hampson Patterson
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Page : 462 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0838641091

Get Book

Domesticating the Reformation by Mary Hampson Patterson Pdf

This book rescues three little-known bestsellers of the English Reformation and employs them in an examination of intellectual and religious revolution. How did sixteenth-century English Protestant manuals of private devotion - often to be read aloud - stream continental theology into the domestic contexts of parish, school, and home? Patterson elucidates ideological programs presented in key texts in light of evolving patterns of public and private worship; she also considers the processes of transmission by which complex doctrinal debates were packaged for cultivating an everyday piety in a confusing age of inflammatory, politicized religion. It is in the most prosaic challenges of daily realities, that the deepest opportunities lie for experiencing the divine. Intersecting issues of piety, rhetoric, and the devotional life of the home, this book brings to life reformists' endeavors to guide popular responses to the Protestant revolution itself.

Author : Steven Mullaney
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2015-07-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226117096

Get Book

The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney Pdf

The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith. As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.

Author : Professor Joanne Rochester
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2013-04-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781409475828

Get Book

Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger by Professor Joanne Rochester Pdf

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 : Margaret E. Owens
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0874138884

Get Book

Stages of Dismemberment by Margaret E. Owens Pdf

"This study has essentially two focuses, two stories to tell. One story traces the secularization, theatricalization, and uncanny returns of suppressed religious culture in early modern drama. The other story concerns the tendency of the theater to expose contingencies and gaps in politico-judicial practices of spectacular violence." "The investigation covers a broad range of plays dating from the fifteenth century to the closing of the theatres in 1642; however, three chapters are devoted to extensive analysis of single plays: R.B.'s Apius and Virginia, Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus."--Jacket.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 1129 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2024-05-24
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780521770187

Get Book

Broken Idols of the English Reformation by Anonim Pdf

Author : Erin Henriksen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2009-11-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004183667

Get Book

Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics of the Passion by Erin Henriksen Pdf

This book addresses the problem of Milton's poetics of the passion, a tradition he revises by turning away from late medieval representations of the crucifixion and drawing instead on earlier Christian images and alternative strategies.

Author : J. Waldron
Publisher : Springer
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2013-02-12
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781137313126

Get Book

Reformations of the Body by J. Waldron Pdf

This project takes the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theatre and overturns a longstanding notion about theatrical phenomenology in this period.

Author : Henry S. Turner
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 637 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2013-12
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780199641352

Get Book

Early Modern Theatricality by Henry S. Turner Pdf

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.

Author : Mary Jo Kietzman
Publisher : Springer
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2018-02-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783319718439

Get Book

The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare by Mary Jo Kietzman Pdf

The theo-political idea of covenant—a sacred binding agreement—formalizes relationships and inaugurates politics in the Hebrew Bible, and it was the most significant revolutionary idea to come out of the Protestant Reformation. Central to sixteenth-century theology, covenant became the cornerstone of the seventeenth-century English Commonweath, evidenced by Parliament’s passage of the Protestation Oath in 1641 which was the “first national covenant against popery and arbitrary government,” followed by the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643. Although there are plenty of books on Shakespeare and religion and Shakespeare and the Bible, no recent critics have recognized how Shakespeare’s plays popularized and spread the covenant idea, making it available for the modern project. By seeding the plays with allusions to biblical covenant stories, Shakespeare not only lends ethical weight to secular lives but develops covenant as the core idea in a civil religion or a founding myth of the early-modern political community, writ small (family and friendship) and large (business and state). Playhouse relationships, especially those between actors and audiences, were also understood through the covenant model, which lent ethical shading to the convention of direct address. Revealing covenant as the biblical beating heart of Shakespeare’s drama, this book helps to explain how the plays provide a smooth transition into secular society based on the idea of social contract.

Author : Michael Witmore
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2018-07-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780801463556

Get Book

Pretty Creatures by Michael Witmore Pdf

Children had surprisingly central roles in many of the public performances of the English Renaissance, whether in entertainments—civic pageants, children's theaters, Shakespearean drama—or in more grim religious and legal settings, as when children were "possessed by demons" or testified as witnesses in witchcraft trials. Taken together, such spectacles made repeated connections between child performers as children and the mimetic powers of fiction in general. In Pretty Creatures, Michael Witmore examines the ways in which children, with their proverbial capacity for spontaneous imitation and their imaginative absorption, came to exemplify the virtues and powers of fiction during this era. As much concerned with Renaissance poetics as with children's roles in public spectacles of the period, Pretty Creatures attempts to bring the antics of children—and the rich commentary these antics provoked—into the mainstream of Renaissance studies, performance studies, and studies of reformation culture in England. As such, it represents an alternative history of the concept of mimesis in the period, one that is built from the ground up through reflections on the actual performances of what was arguably nature's greatest mimic: the child.

Author : Thomas P. Anderson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2016-12-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351912136

Get Book

Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton by Thomas P. Anderson Pdf

An examination of political and cultural acts of commemoration, this study addresses the way personal and collective loss is registered in prose, poetry and drama in early modern England. It focuses on the connection of representation of violence in literary works to historical traumas such as royal death, secularization and regicide. The author contends that dramatic and poetic forms function as historical archives both in their commemoration of the past and in their reenactment of loss that is part of any effort to represent traumatic history. Incorporating contemporary theories of memory and loss, Thomas Anderson here analyzes works by Shakepeare, Marlowe, Webster, Marvell and Milton. Where other studies about violent loss in the period tend to privilege allegorical readings that equate the content of art to its historical analogue, this study insists that artistic representations are performative as they commemorate the past. By interrogating the difficulty in representing historical crises in poetry, drama and political prose, Anderson demonstrates how early modern English identity is the fragile product of an ambivalent desire to flee history. This book's major contribution to Renaissance studies lies in the way it conceives the representations of violent loss-secular and religious-in early modern texts as moments of failed political and social memorialization. It offers a fresh way to understand the development of historical and national identity in England during the Renaissance.

Author : Lisa Hopkins,Helen Ostovich
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2016-05-13
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781317102762

Get Book

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage by Lisa Hopkins,Helen Ostovich Pdf

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is staged and what the representational strategies and techniques might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.

Author : Jay Zysk
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 437 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2017-09-30
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780268102326

Get Book

Shadow and Substance by Jay Zysk Pdf

Shadow and Substance is the first book to present a sustained examination of the relationship between Eucharistic controversy and English drama across the Reformation divide. In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Jay Zysk contends that the Eucharist is not just a devotional object or doctrinal crux, it also shapes a way of thinking about physical embodiment and textual interpretation in theological and dramatic contexts. Regardless of one’s specific religious identity, to speak of the Eucharist during that time was to speak of dynamic interactions between body and sign. In crossing periodic boundaries and revising familiar historical narratives, Shadow and Substance challenges the idea that the Protestant Reformation brings about a decisive shift from the flesh to the word, the theological to the poetic, and the sacred to the secular. The book also adds to studies of English drama and Reformation history by providing an account of how Eucharistic discourse informs understandings of semiotic representation in broader cultural domains. This bold study offers fresh, imaginative readings of theology, sermons, devotional books, and dramatic texts from a range of historical, literary, and religious perspectives. Each of the book’s chapters creates a dialogue between different strands of Eucharistic theology and different varieties of English drama. Spanning England’s long reformation, these plays—some religious in subject matter, others far more secular—reimagine semiotic struggles that stem from the controversies over Christ’s body at a time when these very concepts were undergoing significant rethinking in both religious and literary contexts. Shadow and Substance will have a wide appeal, especially to those interested in medieval and early modern drama and performance, literary theory, Reformation history, and literature and religion.