Theatre And Reformation

Author : Paul Whitfield White
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 1993-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521418178

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Theatre and Reformation by Paul Whitfield White Pdf

Paul Whitfield White argues that, contrary to received wisdom, England's earliest Protestants were involved in drama as patrons, playwrights, performers and spectators. Extending rather than ending the traditional union of religion with dramatic representation, Tudor Protestant leaders in civil and church government recognised drama as a morally sound and profitable pastime and promoted stage playing as a means of winning popular consent for religious reform. From the 1530s, playwrights and players contributed to the formation of a Protestant culture in England. Professor Whitfield White offers detailed readings of plays which are often overlooked, in particular those of John Bale, along with a useful survey of the institutional aspects of theatre: personnel, company structures, patronage, modes of presentation and conditions of performance. This is an interdisciplinary study, of particular value to those studying mediaeval and Renaissance drama and social history.

Author : Musa Gurnis
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2018-07-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780812295184

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Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling by Musa Gurnis Pdf

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling explores the mutually generative relationship between post-Reformation religious life and London's commercial theaters. It explores the dynamic exchange between the imaginatively transformative capacities of shared theatrical experience, with the particular ideological baggage that individual playgoers bring into the theater. While early modern English drama was shaped by the polyvocal, confessional scene in which it was embedded, Musa Gurnis contends that theater does not simply reflect culture but shapes it. According to Gurnis, shared theatrical experience allowed mixed-faith audiences to vicariously occupy alternative emotional and cognitive perspectives across the confessional spectrum. In looking at individual plays, such as Thomas Middleton's A Game of Chess and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Gurnis shows how theatrical process can restructure playgoers' experiences of confessional material and interrupt dominant habits of religious thought. She refutes any assumption that audiences consisted of conforming Church of England Protestants by tracking the complex and changing religious lives of seventy known playgoers. Arguing against work that seeks to draw fixed lines of religious affiliation around individual playwrights or companies, she highlights the common practice of cross-confessional collaboration among playhouse colleagues. Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling demonstrates how post-Reformation representational practices actively reshaped the ways ideologically diverse Londoners accessed the mixture of religious life across the spectrum of beliefs.

Author : Katrin Beushausen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2018-04-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107181458

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Theatre and the English Public from Reformation to Revolution by Katrin Beushausen Pdf

The first study to systematically trace the impact of theatre on the emerging public of the early modern period.

Author : Elizabeth Williamson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2016-03-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317024439

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The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama by Elizabeth Williamson Pdf

The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama is the first book to present a detailed examination of early modern theatrical properties informed by the complexity of post-Reformation religious practice. Although English Protestant reformers set out to destroy all vestiges of Catholic idolatry, public theater companies frequently used stage properties to draw attention to the remnants of traditional religion as well as the persistent materiality of post-Reformation worship. The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama explores the relationship between popular culture and theatrical performance by considering the social history and dramatic function of these properties, addressing their role as objects of devotion, idolatry, and remembrance on the professional stage. Rather than being aligned with identifiably Catholic or Protestant values, the author reveals how religious stage properties functioned as fulcrums around which more subtle debates about the status of Christian worship played out. Given the relative lack of existing documentation on stage properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama employs a wide range of source materials-including inventories published in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes-to account for the material presence of these objects on the public stage. By combining historical research on popular religion with detailed readings of the scripts themselves, the book fills a gap in our knowledge about the physical qualities of the stage properties used in early modern productions. Tracing the theater's appropriation of highly charged religious properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama provides a new framework for understanding the canonization of early modern plays, especially those of Shakespeare.

Author : Huston Diehl
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 261 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2019-06-07
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781501734083

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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 : Dr Elizabeth Williamson,Dr Jane Hwang Degenhardt
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2013-05-28
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781409478638

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Religion and Drama in Early Modern England by Dr Elizabeth Williamson,Dr Jane Hwang Degenhardt Pdf

Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.

Author : J. Waldron
Publisher : Springer
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2013-02-12
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781137313126

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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 : Glenn Ehrstine
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 420 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9004123539

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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 : John W. Frick
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2003-07-21
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780521817783

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Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America by John W. Frick Pdf

This book examines the role of temperance drama in American theatre and compares the American genre to its British counterpart.

Author : Paul Whitfield White,Suzanne R. Westfall
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2006-12-14
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0521034302

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Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England by Paul Whitfield White,Suzanne R. Westfall Pdf

A wide-ranging 2002 study of patronage, relating to Shakespeare and the culture of his time.

Author : Joseph Arrowsmith,Juan A. Prieto Pablos
Publisher : Edicions Universitat Barcelona
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Reformation
ISBN : 8483383810

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The Reformation by Joseph Arrowsmith,Juan A. Prieto Pablos Pdf

The Reformation (1673), attributed to Joseph Arrowsmith, is an amusing satire on the libertine manners of the Stuart court. A group of young men in Venice set up a society to reform sexual mores “à la mode d’Angleterre” and liberate women from the tyranny of fathers and husbands. Described by a contemporary critic as “the Reverse to the Laws of Morality and Virtue”, the play was quickly withdrawn from the stage. The comedy also offers a burlesque portrait of Poet Laureate John Dryden, poking fun at his critical opinions and dramatic production. This is the firts critical edition of the play. The editors place it in its social and cultural context and present a fully annotated text, which enables today’s reader to enjoy and understand Arrowsmith’s lively picture of Restoration life.

Author : John Osborne
Publisher : Plume Books
Page : 132 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Reformation
ISBN : UCSC:32106012994072

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Luther by John Osborne Pdf

Author : Gina M. Di Salvo
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2023-07-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192689962

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The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform by Gina M. Di Salvo Pdf

The age of miracles was not yet past on the Shakespearean stage. In the first book-length study of the English saint play across the Reformation divide, The Renaissance of the Saints after Reform recovers the surprisingly long theatrical life of the saints from a tenth-century monastery to the Restoration stage. Through a reassessment of archival records of performance and religious change, this book challenges the established history of the saint play as a product of medieval devotional culture that ended with the national conversion to Protestantism during the Reformation. Not only did saints in performance frequently diverge from the narratives of devotional literature during the Middle Ages but also saints made a spectacular reappearance in the theatre of the early modern era. In the rupture between those two eras, the English church separated itself from the Cult of the Saints, and saints disappeared from public view until sainthood transformed from a matter of theology into a matter of theatricality. Early modern saint plays document a post-Reformation culture committed to saints—but not all saints. Certain ancient martyrs and British saints returned to the liturgical calendar in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. This limited inventory performed an initial de-Catholicization of these saints, but it did not recover their lives. Instead, the theatre produced new lives of the saints for the English public. A period of experimentation with saints and devils in the 1590s was followed by unprecedented innovation throughout the Stuart era. This book traces the transformation of sainthood in early modern drama from ambiguous supernatural association and negotiated patronage to a renaissance of miraculous theatricality and sacred place-making. By excavating saints in plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger, and Rowley, as well as plays authored by relatively unknown dramatists, this book reconfigures how we think about the legacy of late medieval religious culture, the impact of Reformation change on literary texts and social practices, and the development of English theatre and drama.

Author : Francis Edwards
Publisher : James Clarke & Co.
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1976
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0718821807

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Ritual and Drama by Francis Edwards Pdf

This volume presents the development of medieval drama from its origins from Christian rituals, the growth of the dramatic idea, styles of dramatic presentation, and the evolution of the morality play. This work focuses on the time period of the 900s to the end of the 1400s A.D.

Author : J. R. Mulryne,Margaret Shewring
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 1993-07-08
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0521401593

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Theatre and Government Under the Early Stuarts by J. R. Mulryne,Margaret Shewring Pdf

This collection of commissioned essays by established scholars, responds to critical debate on political theatre of the turbulent early years of the seventeenth century. Theatre is widely interpreted. The authors discuss censorship, the social implications of pageantry, Reformation ideals, popular theatre and the politics of the masque throughout the period. An early chapter discusses political theatre in the light of work by revisionist and post-revisionist historians. The drama of Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, Massinger, Chapman, Heywood and Rowley is given detailed attention, while Shakespeare's plays are considered in the introductory chapter.