Early Responses to Renaissance Drama

Early Responses to Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Charles Whitney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521858437
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
A study of early responses to the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Renaissance dramatists.

Early Responses to Renaissance Drama

Early Responses to Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Charles Whitney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521858437
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 24

Get Book Here

Book Description
A study of early responses to the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Renaissance dramatists.

Early Responses to Renaissance Drama

Early Responses to Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Charles Whitney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521117203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
It is often assumed that we can never know how the earliest audiences responded to the plays and playbooks of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Renaissance dramatists. In this study, old compilations of early modern dramatic allusions provide the surprising key to understanding pre-1660 reception. Whether or not it begins with powerful emotion, that reception creatively applies and appropriates the copious resources of drama for diverse purposes, lessons, and interests. Informed also by critical theory and historical research, this understanding reveals the significance of response to Tamburlaine and Falstaff as well as the importance of drama to Edmund Spenser, John Donne, John Milton, and many others. It makes possible the study of particular responses of women and of workers and contributes to the history of subjectivity, reading, civil society, and aesthetics, and demands a fresh view of dramatic production.

Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication

Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication PDF Author: Zachary Lesser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521842525
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A study of the practices and politics of early modern publishers of plays.

Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama

Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Ariane M. Balizet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317961951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In this volume, the author argues that blood was, crucially, a means by which dramatists negotiated shifting contours of domesticity in 16th and 17th century England. Early modern English drama vividly addressed contemporary debates over an expanding idea of "the domestic," which encompassed the domus as well as sex, parenthood, household order, the relationship between home and state, and the connections between family honor and national identity. The author contends that the domestic ideology expressed by theatrical depictions of marriage and household order is one built on the simultaneous familiarity and violence inherent to blood. The theatrical relation between blood and home is far more intricate than the idealized language of the familial bloodline; the home was itself a bloody place, with domestic bloodstains signifying a range of experiences including religious worship, sex, murder, birth, healing, and holy justice. Focusing on four bleeding figures—the Bleeding Bride, Bleeding Husband, Bleeding Child, and Bleeding Patient—the author argues that the household blood of the early modern stage not only expressed the violence and conflict occasioned by domestic ideology, but also established the home as a site that alternately reified and challenged patriarchal authority.

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.

Moral Play and Counterpublic

Moral Play and Counterpublic PDF Author: Ineke Murakami
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136807101
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
In this study, Murakami overturns the misconception that popular English morality plays were simple medieval vehicles for disseminating conservative religious doctrine. On the contrary, Murakami finds that moral drama came into its own in the sixteenth century as a method for challenging normative views on ethics, economics, social rank, and political obligation. From its inception in itinerate troupe productions of the late fifteenth century, "moral play" served not as a cloistered form, but as a volatile public forum. This book demonstrates how the genre’s apparently inert conventions—from allegorical characters to the battle between good and evil for Mankind’s soul—veiled critical explorations of topical issues. Through close analysis of plays representing key moments of formal and ideological innovation from 1465 to 1599, Murakami makes a new argument for what is at stake in the much-discussed anxiety around the entwined social practices of professional theater and the emergent capitalist market. Moral play fostered a phenomenon that was ultimately more threatening to ‘the peace’ of the realm than either theater or the notorious market--a political self-consciousness that gave rise to ephemeral, non-elite counterpublics who defined themselves against institutional forms of authority.

Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561-1633

Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561-1633 PDF Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131714824X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
The succession to the throne, Lisa Hopkins argues here, was a burning topic not only in the final years of Elizabeth but well into the 1630s, with continuing questions about how James's two kingdoms might be ruled after his death. Because the issue, with its attendant constitutional questions, was so politically sensitive, Hopkins contends that drama, with its riddled identities, oblique relationship to reality, and inherent blurring of the extent to which the situation it dramatizes is indicative or particular, offered a crucial forum for the discussion. Hopkins analyzes some of the ways in which the dramatic works of the time - by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster and Ford among others - reflect, negotiate and dream the issue of the succession to the throne.

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling PDF Author: Musa Gurnis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
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.

Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts

Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts PDF Author: Laura Estill
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644530473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences. Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton’s signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, “different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.” By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion

Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion PDF Author: William N. West
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022680898X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
A new account of playgoing in Elizabethan England, in which audiences participated as much as performers. What if going to a play in Elizabethan England was more like attending a football match than a Broadway show—or playing in one? In Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion, William N. West proposes a new account of the kind of participatory entertainment expected by the actors and the audience during the careers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. West finds surprising descriptions of these theatrical experiences in the figurative language of early modern players and playgoers—including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting. Such words and ways of speaking are still in use today, but their earlier meanings, like that of theater itself, are subtly, importantly different from our own. Playing was not confined to the actors on the stage but filled the playhouse, embracing audiences and performers in collaborative experiences that did not belong to any one alone but to the assembled, various crowd. What emerged in playing was a kind of thinking and feeling distributed across persons and times that were otherwise distinct. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears—these and more gave verbal shape to the physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption.