Author: Alexander Leggatt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719049651
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline comedy, covering both public and private theatres, emphasizing the eclectic, experimental nature of this comedy--its departures from the mainstream New Comedy tradition and its searching, witty analysis of social and personal relations in court, city and country. In his close analysis of some of the richest comedies of the period, Alexander Leggatt makes some unexpected connections between them. The reader is given a comprehensive picture of English comedy in one of its most creative periods.
Author: Richard F. Hardin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683931297
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
The fifteenth-century discovery of Plautus’s lost comedies brought him, for the first time since antiquity, the status of a major author both on stage and page. It also led to a reinvention of comedy and to new thinking about its art and potential. This book aims to define the unique contribution of Plautus, detached from his fellow Roman dramatist Terence, and seen in the context of that European revival, first as it took shape on the Continent. The heart of the book, with special focus on English comedy ca. 1560 to 1640, analyzes elements of Plautine technique during the period, as differentiated from native and Terentian, considering such points of comparison as dialogue, asides, metadrama, observation scenes, characterization, and atmosphere. This is the first book to cover this ground, raising such questions as: How did comedy rather suddenly progress from the interludes and brief plays of the early sixteenth century to longer, more complex plays? What did “Plautus” mean to playwrights and readers of the time? Plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton are foregrounded, but many other comedies provide illustration and support.
Author: Robert Shaughnessy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350316504
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
This edition of four Renaissance comedies represents the vitality, range and diversity of the English comic drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reflecting both its capacity for escapist fantasy and its concern with the intrigues of everyday city life. Comprehensive textual notes establish the plays in their originating cultural and theatrical circumstances, as well as explaining obscure references and allusions. A general introduction provides a helpful overview of early modern comedy in the context of Renaissance comic theory and practice, together with an assessment of its continuing theatrical appeal.
Author: Mary Beth Rose
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723251
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
A public and highly popular literary form, English Renaissance drama affords a uniquely valuable index of the process of cultural transformation. The Expense of Spirit integrates feminist and historicist critical approaches to explore the dynamics of cultural conflict and change during a crucial period in the formation of modern sexual values. Comparing Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic representations of love and sexuality with those in contemporary moral tracts and religious writings on women, love, and marriage, Mary Beth Rose argues that such literature not only interpreted sexual sensibilities but also contributed to creating and transforming them.
Author: Donald Beecher
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802097235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 946
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Book Description
In this second volume of Renaissance Comedy, Donald Beecher presents six more of the best-known plays of the period, each with its own introduction, reading notes, and annotations. Beecher's general introduction, though stand-alone, complements and extends the historical and critical essay prefacing the first volume. Together, the eleven plays in both volumes illuminate the range, variety, and development of the Italian comedy. The second volume of Renaissance Comedy raises fascinating questions about the uses of classical literature, the conventions of comedy, the politics of theatrical production, and the representation of contemporary social issues. Though it is clear that comedic plays exercised considerable influence over the development of European drama, these plays are above all remarkable for their sheer wit and invention, and their capacity to generate laughter and admiration in readers nearly half a millennium later.
Author: John Pitcher
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838639283
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing essays and studies as well as book reviews of the many significant books and essays dealing with the cultural history of medieval and early modern England as expressed by and realized in its drama exclusive of Shakespeare.
Author: Robert Shaughnessy
Publisher: Red Globe Press
ISBN: 0333973658
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This edition of four Renaissance comedies represents the vitality, range and diversity of the English comic drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reflecting both its capacity for escapist fantasy and its concern with the intrigues of everyday city life. Comprehensive textual notes establish the plays in their originating cultural and theatrical circumstances, as well as explaining obscure references and allusions. A general introduction provides a helpful overview of early modern comedy in the context of Renaissance comic theory and practice, together with an assessment of its continuing theatrical appeal.
Author: C W R D Moseley
Publisher: Humanities-Ebooks
ISBN: 1847601839
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
Introduces the conclusions of recent scholarship and research into theatrical conditions, conventions and concepts in the time of Shakespeare. The book begins with a discussion of the origins of early modern English drama and of the theatres that were built for it. Attitudes to theatre and to players, and what audiences expected of both, are explored in the contexts of the constraints of the acting space and the political culture. The book then looks at the structure and dynamics of the theatrical companies before concluding with a discussion of the genres of plays and the expectations of them that people (including writers) held. Appendices list brief details of the major dramatists of the time, and summarise the main historical and dramatic events.
Author: Penny Gay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139469770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
Why did theatre audiences laugh in Shakespeare's day? Why do they still laugh now? What did Shakespeare do with the conventions of comedy that he inherited, so that his plays continue to amuse and move audiences? What do his comedies have to say about love, sex, gender, power, family, community, and class? What place have pain, cruelty, and even death in a comedy? Why all those puns? In a survey that travels from Shakespeare's earliest experiments in farce and courtly love-stories to the great romantic comedies of his middle years and the mould-breaking experiments of his last decade's work, this book addresses these vital questions. Organised thematically, and covering all Shakespeare's comedies from the beginning to the end of his career, it provides readers with a map of the playwright's comic styles, showing how he built on comedic conventions as he further enriched the possibilities of the genre.
Author: Wendy Beth Hyman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317040805
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem only partly and sporadically to function as embodiments of an emerging mechanistic or materialist worldview. Renaissance automata were just as likely not to confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were often a source of wonder, suggestive of magic, proof of the uncannily animating effect of poetry-indeed, just as likely to unsettle the divide between man and divinity as that between man and matter.
