Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England

Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England PDF Author: Judith Deborah Haber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521518679
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This wide-ranging study uses close readings of texts by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton and Ford to investigate the intersections of erotic desire and dramatic form in the early modern period, considering to what extent disruptive desires can successfully challenge, change or undermine the structures in which they are embedded.

Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England

Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England PDF Author: Judith Deborah Haber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521518679
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This wide-ranging study uses close readings of texts by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton and Ford to investigate the intersections of erotic desire and dramatic form in the early modern period, considering to what extent disruptive desires can successfully challenge, change or undermine the structures in which they are embedded.

Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama

Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Jeremy Lopez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139436678
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book gives a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Besides providing readings of plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, it also places Shakespeare emphatically within his own theatrical context, and focuses on the relationship between the demanding repertory system of the time and the conventions and content of the plays. Lopez argues that the limitations of the relatively bare stage and non-naturalistic mode of early modern theatre would have made the potential for failure very great, and he proposes that understanding this potential for failure is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on stage. The book offers perspectives on familiar conventions such as the pun, the aside and the expository speech; and it works toward a definition of early modern theatrical genres based on the relationship between these well-known conventions and the incoherent experience of early modern theatrical narratives.

Unfixable Forms

Unfixable Forms PDF Author: Katherine Schaap Williams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.

Heaven and the Flesh

Heaven and the Flesh PDF Author: Clive Hart
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521495714
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Do angels make love? Will the souls of ordinary people feel sexual pleasure in the next world? Is the aspiration to spiritual salvation helped or hindered by sexual experience? In Heaven and the Flesh Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson explore the opinions of poets and painters on such questions, from the high Renaissance to the birth of romanticism. Hart and Stevenson analyse the work not only of canonical writers and artists, such as Milton and Michelangelo, but also of lesser-known figures such as John Gore and Richard Tompson, and the sometimes anguished speculations of philosophers and theologians. As the evidence of witty pornographic poems and drawings demonstrates, the relationship between sexual desire and spiritual ascension was not always treated with full seriousness. This wide-ranging survey offers sometimes surprising insights into material both familiar and unfamiliar.

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance PDF Author: Keith Botelho
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271094591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from early modern England in order to understand how people in that era thought about—and with—insect and arachnid life. Designed for the classroom, the book comprises two volumes—Insects and Concepts—that can be used together or independently. Each addresses the collaborative, multigenerational research that produced early modern natural history and provides new insights into the old question of what it means to be human in a world populated by beasts large and small. Volume 1, Insects, examines how insects burrowed into the literal and symbolic economies of the era. The contributors consider diminutive creatures—such as bees and beetles, flies and fleas, silkworms and spiders—and their depictions in plays, poetry, fables, natural histories, and more. In doing so, they illuminate how early modern science and literature worked as intersecting systems of knowledge production about the natural world and show definitively how insect life was, and remains, intimately entangled with human life. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume include Chris Barrett, Roya Biggie, Bruce Boehrer, Gary Bouchard, Dan Brayton, Eric Brown, Mary Baine Campbell, Perry Guevara, Shannon Kelley, Emily King, Karen Raber, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Donovan Sherman, and Steven Swarbrick.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature PDF Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191077798
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 752

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This second volume covers the years 1558-1660, and explores the reception of the ancient genres and authors in English Renaissance literature, engaging with the major, and many of the minor, writers of the period, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Jonson. Separate chapters examine the Renaissance institutions and contexts which shape the reception of antiquity, and an annotated bibliography provides substantial material for further reading.

Edward II: A Critical Reader

Edward II: A Critical Reader PDF Author: Kirk Melnikoff
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472584058
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Edward II: A Critical Reader gives students, teachers and scholars alike an overview of the play's reception both in the theatre and among artists and critics, from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 21st. The volume also offers a series of new perspectives on the play by leading experts in the field of early modern history and culture. Bolstered with a timeline tracking Marlowe's life and work, an up-to-date bibliography and an extensive index, this collection is an ideal and definitive guide to Edward II.

Travel and Travail

Travel and Travail PDF Author: Mary C. Fuller
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496210298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.

Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans

Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans PDF Author: Leo Salingar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521308569
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A collection of essays concerned with aspects of dramatic form in works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton

Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton PDF Author: John Rumrich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108395120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Seventeenth-century England teemed with speculation on body and its relation to soul. Descartes' dualist certainty was countered by materialisms, whether mechanist or vitalist. The most important and distinctive literary reflection of this ferment is John Milton's vitalist or animist materialism, which underwrites the cosmic worlds of Paradise Lost. In a time of philosophical upheaval and innovation, Milton and an unusual collection of fascinating and diverse contemporary writers, including John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, John Bunyan, and Hester Pulter, addressed the potency of the body, now viewed not as a drag on the immaterial soul or a site of embarrassment but as an occasion for heroic striving and a vehicle of transcendence. This collection addresses embodiment in relation to the immortal longings of early modern writers, variously abetted by the new science, print culture, and the Copernican upheaval of the heavens.