Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres

Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres PDF Author: Matthew Steggle
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754657026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
How and when did Shakespeare's audiences laugh, and weep, in early modern theatres? And when laughter, or weeping, were represented on that stage-as they are in hundreds of plays from this period-how were they acted out? This book considers laughter and weeping in the theatres of 1550-1642, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.

Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres

Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres PDF Author: Matthew Steggle
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754657026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
How and when did Shakespeare's audiences laugh, and weep, in early modern theatres? And when laughter, or weeping, were represented on that stage-as they are in hundreds of plays from this period-how were they acted out? This book considers laughter and weeping in the theatres of 1550-1642, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.

Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres

Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres PDF Author: Matthew Steggle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351922998
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Did Shakespeare's original audiences weep? Equally, while it seems obvious that they must have laughed at plays performed in early modern theatres, can we say anything about what their laughter sounded like, about when it occurred, and about how, culturally, it was interpreted? Related to both of these problems of audience behaviour is that of the stage representation of laughing, and weeping, both actions performed with astonishing frequency in early modern drama. Each action is associated with a complex set of non-verbal noises, gestures, and cultural overtones, and each is linked to audience behaviour through one of the axioms of Renaissance dramatic theory: that weeping and laughter on stage cause, respectively, weeping and laughter in the audience. This book is a study of laughter and weeping in English theatres, broadly defined, from around 1550 until their closure in 1642. It is concerned both with the representation of these actions on the stage, and with what can be reconstructed about the laughter and weeping of theatrical audiences themselves, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Leslie C. Dunn
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030572080
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England PDF Author: Annette Kern-Stähler
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004315497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England. Contributors include: Dieter Bitterli, Beatrix Busse, Rory Critten, Javier Díaz-Vera, Tobias Gabel, Jens Martin Gurr, Katherine Hindley, Farah Karim-Cooper, Annette Kern-Stähler, Richard Newhauser, Sean Otto, Virginia Richter, Elizabeth Robertson, and Kathrin Scheuchzer

Weeping Britannia

Weeping Britannia PDF Author: Thomas Dixon
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199676054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
There is a persistent myth about the British: that they are a nation of stoics, with stiff upper lips, repressed emotions, and inactive lachrymal glands. Weeping Britannia--the first history of crying in Britain--comprehensively debunks this myth. Far from being a persistent element in the national character, the notion of the British stiff upper lip was in fact the product of a relatively brief and militaristic period of the nation's past, from about 1870 to 1945. In earlier times we were a nation of proficient, sometimes virtuosic moral weepers. To illustrate this perhaps surprising fact, Thomas Dixon charts six centuries of weeping Britons, and theories about them, from the medieval mystic Margery Kempe in the early fifteenth century, to Paul Gascoigne's famous tears in the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup. In between, the book includes the tears of some of the most influential figures in British history, from Oliver Cromwell to Margaret Thatcher (not forgetting George III, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, and Winston Churchill along the way). But the history of weeping in Britain is not simply one of famous tear-stained individuals. These tearful micro-histories all contribute to a bigger picture of changing emotional ideas and styles over the centuries, touching on many other fascinating areas of our history. For instance, the book also investigates the histories of painting, literature, theatre, music and the cinema to discover how and why people have been moved to tears by the arts, from the sentimental paintings and novels of the eighteenth century and the romantic music of the nineteenth, to Hollywood weepies, expressionist art, and pop music in the twentieth century. Weeping Britannia is simultaneously a museum of tears and a philosophical handbook, using history to shed new light on the changing nature of Britishness over time, as well as the ever-shifting ways in which Britons express and understand their emotional lives. The story that emerges is one in which a previously rich religious and cultural history of producing and interpreting tears was almost completely erased by the rise of a stoical and repressed British empire in the late nineteenth century. Those forgotten philosophies of tears and feeling can now be rediscovered. In the process, readers might perhaps come to view their own tears in a different light, as something more than mere emotional incontinence.

Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre

Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre PDF Author: Richard Preiss
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036577
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Richard Preiss presents a lively and provocative study of how the ever-popular stage clown shaped early modern playhouse theatre.

Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage

Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Bridget Escolme
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408179687
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage demonstrates the links made between excess of emotion and madness in the early modern period. It argues that the ways in which today's popular and theatrical cultures judge how much is too much can distort our understanding of early modern drama and theatre. It argues that permitting the excesses of the early modern drama onto the contemporary stage might free actors and audiences alike from assumptions that in order to engage with the drama of the past, its characters must be just like us. The book deals with characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries who are sad for too long, or angry to the point of irrationality; people who laugh when they shouldn't or make their audiences do so; people whose selfhood has broken down into an excess of fragmentary extremes and who are labelled mad. It is about moments in the theatre when excessive emotion is rewarded and applauded - and about moments when the expression of emotion is in excess of what is socially acceptable: embarrassing, shameful, unsettling or insane. The book explores the broader cultures of emotion that produce these theatrical moments, and the theatre's role in regulating and extending the acceptable expression of emotion. It is concerned with the acting of excessive emotion and with acting emotion excessively. And it asks how these excesses are produced or erased, give pleasure or pain, in versions of early modern drama in theatre, film and television today. Plays discussed include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Spanish Tragedy, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, and Coriolanus.

The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema

The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema PDF Author: J. Sager
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137332409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Examining the work of the Elizabethan playwright, Robert Greene, this book argues that Greene's plays are innovative in their use of spectacle. Its most striking feature is the use of the one-to-one analogies between Greene's drama and modern cinema, in order to explore the plays' stage effects.

Shakespeare and Emotions

Shakespeare and Emotions PDF Author: R. White
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137464755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This collection of essays approaches the works of Shakespeare from the topical perspective of the History of Emotions. Contributions come from established and emergent scholars from a range of disciplines, including performance history, musicology and literary history.

Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre

Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre PDF Author: Evelyn Tribble
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472576047
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
What skills did Shakespeare's actors bring to their craft? How do these skills differ from those of contemporary actors? Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body examines the 'toolkit' of the early modern player and suggests new readings of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their many skills. Theatre is an ephemeral medium. Little remains to us of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: some printed texts, scattered documents and records, and a few scraps of description, praise, and detraction. Because most of what survives are printed playbooks, students of English theatre find it easy to forget that much of what happened on the early modern stage took place within the gaps of written language: the implicit or explicit calls for fights, dances, military formations, feats of physical skill, song, and clowning. Theatre historians and textual editors have often ignored or denigrated such moments, seeing them merely as extraneous amusements or signs that the text has been 'corrupted' by actors. This book argues that recapturing a positive account of the skills and expertise of the early modern players will result in a more capacious understanding of the nature of theatricality in the period.