John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647 PDF Author: Barbara Wooding
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131711065X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Even for scholars who have devoted their careers to the early modern theatre, the name John Lowin may not instantly evoke recognition-until now, the actor's life and contribution to the theatre of the period has never been the subject of a full-length publication. In this study, Barbara Wooding provides a comprehensive overview of the life and times of Lowin, a leader of the King's Men's Company and one of the greatest actors of the seventeenth century. She examines his involvement in the Jacobean/Caroline world as performer, citizen and company manager, and contextualizes his life and career within the socio-economic and political framework of the period. Although references to him in the archives are patchy and sporadic, information about his activities within the King's Men's Company is well documented. In the course of analysing less familiar plays of the period and the characters Lowin played in them, Wooding supplements critical understanding of the scope and range of Caroline drama. Because Lowin's career burgeoned after Shakespeare's and Burbage's death, his life in Southwark and his career with the same company furnishes the opportunity for an examination of the changing status of actors, and the exercising of their skills within the drama of the later playhouse period.

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647 PDF Author: Barbara Wooding
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131711065X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Even for scholars who have devoted their careers to the early modern theatre, the name John Lowin may not instantly evoke recognition-until now, the actor's life and contribution to the theatre of the period has never been the subject of a full-length publication. In this study, Barbara Wooding provides a comprehensive overview of the life and times of Lowin, a leader of the King's Men's Company and one of the greatest actors of the seventeenth century. She examines his involvement in the Jacobean/Caroline world as performer, citizen and company manager, and contextualizes his life and career within the socio-economic and political framework of the period. Although references to him in the archives are patchy and sporadic, information about his activities within the King's Men's Company is well documented. In the course of analysing less familiar plays of the period and the characters Lowin played in them, Wooding supplements critical understanding of the scope and range of Caroline drama. Because Lowin's career burgeoned after Shakespeare's and Burbage's death, his life in Southwark and his career with the same company furnishes the opportunity for an examination of the changing status of actors, and the exercising of their skills within the drama of the later playhouse period.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 28

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 28 PDF Author: S.P. Cerasano
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 0838644783
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international journal committee to the publication of essays and reviews relevant to drama and theatre history to 1642. This issue includes eight new articles and reviews of fourteen books.

Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England

Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England PDF Author: Matthew Steggle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317150783
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
This book establishes new information about the likely content of ten lost plays from the period 1580-1642. These plays’ authors include Nashe, Heywood, and Dekker; and the plays themselves connect in direct ways to some of the most canonical dramas of English literature, including Hamlet, King Lear, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi. The lost plays in question are: Terminus & Non Terminus (1586-8); Richard the Confessor (1593); Cutlack (1594); Bellendon (1594); Truth's Supplication to Candlelight (1600); Albere Galles (1602); Henry the Una (c. 1619); The Angel King (1624); The Duchess of Fernandina (c. 1630-42); and The Cardinal's Conspiracy (bef. 1639). From this list of bare titles, it is argued, can be reconstructed comedies, tragedies, and histories, whose leading characters included a saint, a robber, a Medici duchess, an impotent king, at least one pope, and an angel. In each case, newly-available digital research resources make it possible to interrogate the title and to identify the play's subject-matter, analogues, and likely genre. But these concrete examples raise wider theoretical problems: What is a lost play? What can, and cannot, be said about objects in this problematic category? Known lost plays from the early modern commercial theatre outnumber extant plays from that theatre: but how, in practice, can one investigate them? This book offers an innovative theoretical and practical frame for such work, putting digital humanities into action in the emerging field of lost play studies.

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.

Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars

Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars PDF Author: Heidi Craig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009224042
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Focusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance PDF Author: Lynsey McCulloch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019049879X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
Shakespeare's texts have a long and close relationship with many different types of dance, from dance forms referenced in the plays to adaptations across many genres today. With contributions from experienced and emerging scholars, this handbook provides a concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image. Motivated by growing interest in movement, materiality, and the body, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance. In the handbook's first section - Shakespeare and Dance - authors consider dance within the context of early modern life and culture and investigate Shakespeare's use of dance forms within his writing. The latter half of the handbook - Shakespeare as Dance - explores the ways that choreographers have adapted Shakespeare's work. Chapters address everything from narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theater adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms such as Cambodian traditional dance or igal, an indigenous dance form from the southern Philippines. With a truly interdisciplinary approach, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance provides an indispensable resource for considerations of dance and corporeality on Shakespeare's stage and the early modern era.

James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre

James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre PDF Author: Barbara Ravelhofer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317111524
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
James Shirley was the last great dramatist of the English Renaissance, shining out among other luminaries such as John Ford, Ben Jonson, or Richard Brome. This collection considers Shirley within the culture of his time, and highlights his contribution to seventeenth-century English literature as poet and playwright. Individual essays explore Shirley’s musical theatre and spoken verse, performance conditions, female agency and politics, and the presentation of his work in manuscript and print. Collectively, the essays assemble a larger picture of Caroline drama, showing it to be more than simply a nostalgic endgame, its poets daintily sipping hemlock on the eve of the Civil Wars. Shirley’s literary versatility and long life, spanning the last days of Queen Elizabeth I to the ascension of Charles II, make him an ideal writer through whom to examine the distinctive qualities of Caroline theatre.

Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage PDF Author: Asuka Kimura
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater

Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater PDF Author: Matteo A. Pangallo
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249410
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Using a range of familiar and lesser-known print and manuscript plays, as well as literary accounts and documentary evidence, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater shows how these playgoers wrote and revised to address what they assumed to be the needs of actors, readers, and the Master of the Revels; how they understood playhouse materials and practices; and how they crafted poetry for theatrical effects. The book also situates them in the context of the period's concepts of, and attitudes toward, playgoers' participation in the activity of playmaking. --Publisher description.

Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110361647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions, medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had presented their research at a symposium at The University of Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative, knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance, intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and important also for the post-modern world.