Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama

Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama PDF Author: Regina Buccola
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 0754684156
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the period and the theater that it spawned. Contributors analyze the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization.

Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama

Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama PDF Author: Regina Buccola
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 0754684156
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the period and the theater that it spawned. Contributors analyze the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization.

Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama PDF Author: Daniel Cadman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317052129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama examines the development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as ’closet drama’, during the years 1590-1613. It is the first book-length study since 1924 to consider these plays - the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd - as a coherent group. Daniel Cadman suggests these works interrogate the relations between sovereigns and subjects during the early modern period by engaging with the humanist discourses of republicanism and stoicism. Cadman argues that the texts under study probe various aspects of this dynamic and illuminate the ways in which stoicism and republicanism provide essential frameworks for negotiating this relationship between the marginalized courtier and the absolute sovereign. He demonstrates how aristocrats and courtiers, such as Sidney, Greville, Alexander, and Cary, were able to use the neo-Senecan form to consider aspects of their limited political agency under an absolute monarch, while others, such as Brandon and Daniel, respond to similarly marginalized positions within both political and patronage networks. In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political culture, this book addresses several gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama and explores new contexts in relation to more familiar writers, as well as extending the critical debate to include hitherto neglected authors.

The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama

The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Elizabeth Williamson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317024435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama is the first book to present a detailed examination of early modern theatrical properties informed by the complexity of post-Reformation religious practice. Although English Protestant reformers set out to destroy all vestiges of Catholic idolatry, public theater companies frequently used stage properties to draw attention to the remnants of traditional religion as well as the persistent materiality of post-Reformation worship. The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama explores the relationship between popular culture and theatrical performance by considering the social history and dramatic function of these properties, addressing their role as objects of devotion, idolatry, and remembrance on the professional stage. Rather than being aligned with identifiably Catholic or Protestant values, the author reveals how religious stage properties functioned as fulcrums around which more subtle debates about the status of Christian worship played out. Given the relative lack of existing documentation on stage properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama employs a wide range of source materials-including inventories published in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes-to account for the material presence of these objects on the public stage. By combining historical research on popular religion with detailed readings of the scripts themselves, the book fills a gap in our knowledge about the physical qualities of the stage properties used in early modern productions. Tracing the theater's appropriation of highly charged religious properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama provides a new framework for understanding the canonization of early modern plays, especially those of Shakespeare.

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.

Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature

Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Alison Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135132313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book visits the fact that, in the pre-modern world, saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word "patron" used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Chapman argues that this elision of patron saints and patron lords remained a distinctive feature of the early modern English imagination and that it is central to some of the key works of literature in the period. Writers like Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, Donne and, Milton all use medieval patron saints in order to represent and to challenge early modern ideas of patronage -- not just patronage in the narrow sense of the immediate economic relations obtaining between client and sponsor, but also patronage as a society-wide system of obligation and reward that itself crystallized a whole culture’s assumptions about order and degree. The works studied in this book -- ranging from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, written early in the 1590s, to Milton’s Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle, written in 1634 -- are patronage works, either aimed at a specific patron or showing a keen awareness of the larger patronage system. This volume challenges the idea that the early modern world had shrugged off its own medieval past, instead arguing that Protestant writers in the period were actively using the medieval Catholic ideal of the saint as a means to represent contemporary systems of hierarchy and dependence. Saints had been the ideal -- and idealized -- patrons of the medieval world and remained so for early modern English recusants. As a result, their legends and iconographies provided early modern Protestant authors with the perfect tool for thinking about the urgent and complex question of who owed allegiance to whom in a rapidly changing world.

Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700

Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 PDF Author: Victoria Brownlee
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526110628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
At once pervasive and marginal, appealing and repellent, exemplary and atypical, the women of the Bible provoke an assortment of readings across early modern literature. Biblical women in early modern literary culture, 1550–1700 draws attention to the complex ways in which biblical women’s narratives could be reimagined for a variety of rhetorical and religious purposes. Considering a confessionally diverse range of writers, working across a variety of genres, this volume reveals how women from the Old and New Testaments exhibit an ideological power that frequently exceeds, both in scope and substance, their associated scriptural records. The essays explore how the Bible’s women are fluidly negotiated and diversely redeployed to offer (conflicting) comment on issues including female authority, speech and sexuality, and in discussions of doctrine, confessional politics, exploration and grief. As it explores the rich ideological currency of the Bible’s women in early modern culture, this volume demonstrates that the Bible’s women are persistently difficult to evade.

Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts

Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts PDF Author: Arthur F. Marotti
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814339565
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Scholars of religious, literary, and cultural history will enjoy this illuminating collection.

Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts

Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts PDF Author: Mary Ellen Lamb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351152068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Proposing a fresh approach to scholarship on the topic, this volume explores the cultural meanings, especially the gendered meanings, of material associated with oral traditions. The collection is divided into three sections. Part One investigates the evocations of the 'old nurse' as storyteller so prominent in early modern fictions. The essays in Part Two investigate women's fashioning of oral traditions to serve their own purposes. The third section disturbs the exclusive associations between the feminine and oral traditions to discover implications for masculinity, as well. Contributors explore the plays of Shakespeare and writings of Spenser, Sidney, Wroth and the Cavendishes, as well as works by less well known or even unknown authors. Framed by an introduction by Mary Ellen Lamb and an afterword by Pamela Allen Brown, these essays make several important interventions in scholarship in the field. They demonstrate the continuing cultural importance of an oral tradition of tales and ballads, even if sometimes circulated in manuscript and printed forms. Rather than in its mode of transmission, contributors posit that the continuing significance of this oral tradition lies instead in the mode of consumption (the immediacy of the interaction of the participants). Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts confirms the power of oral traditions to shape and also to unsettle concepts of the masculine as well as of the feminine. This collection usefully complicates any easy assumptions about associations of oral traditions with gender.

The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England

The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England PDF Author: Andrew Gordon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044347
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
The early modern period inherited a deeply-ingrained culture of Christian remembrance that proved a platform for creativity in a remarkable variety of forms. From the literature of church ritual to the construction of monuments; from portraiture to the arrangement of domestic interiors; from the development of textual rites to drama of the contemporary stage, the early modern world practiced 'arts of remembrance' at every turn. The turmoils of the Reformation and its aftermath transformed the habits of creating through remembrance. Ritually observed and radically reinvented, remembrance was a focal point of the early modern cultural imagination for an age when beliefs both crossed and divided communities of the faithful. The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England maps the new terrain of remembrance in the post-Reformation period, charting its negotiations with the material, the textual and the performative.

Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625

Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625 PDF Author: Victoria Brownlee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198812485
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This book considers the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in early modern England and it explores the impact of how the Bible was read across a variety of writers and genres.