Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England

Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England PDF Author: Meg Twycross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135191930X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Drawing on broad research, this study explores the different social and theatrical masking activities in England during the Middle Ages and the early 16th century. The authors present a coherent explanation of the many functions of masking, emphasizing the important links among festive practice, specialized ceremonial, and drama. They elucidate the intellectual, moral and social contexts for masking, and they examine the purposes and rewards for participants in the activity. The authors' insight into the masking games and performances of England's medieval and early Tudor periods illuminates many aspects of the thinking and culture of the times: issues of identity and community; performance and role-play; conceptions of the psyche and of the individual's position in social and spiritual structures. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England presents a broad overview of masking practices, demonstrating how active and prominent an element of medieval and pre-modern culture masking was. It has obvious interest for drama and literature critics of the medieval and early modern periods; but is also useful for historians of culture, theatre and anthropology. Through its analysis of masked play this study engages both with the history of theatre and performance, and with broader cultural and historical questions of social organization, identity and the self, the performance of power, and shifting spiritual understanding.

Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England

Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England PDF Author: Meg Twycross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135191930X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on broad research, this study explores the different social and theatrical masking activities in England during the Middle Ages and the early 16th century. The authors present a coherent explanation of the many functions of masking, emphasizing the important links among festive practice, specialized ceremonial, and drama. They elucidate the intellectual, moral and social contexts for masking, and they examine the purposes and rewards for participants in the activity. The authors' insight into the masking games and performances of England's medieval and early Tudor periods illuminates many aspects of the thinking and culture of the times: issues of identity and community; performance and role-play; conceptions of the psyche and of the individual's position in social and spiritual structures. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England presents a broad overview of masking practices, demonstrating how active and prominent an element of medieval and pre-modern culture masking was. It has obvious interest for drama and literature critics of the medieval and early modern periods; but is also useful for historians of culture, theatre and anthropology. Through its analysis of masked play this study engages both with the history of theatre and performance, and with broader cultural and historical questions of social organization, identity and the self, the performance of power, and shifting spiritual understanding.

Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England

Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England PDF Author: Meg Twycross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
This series presents original research on theatre histories and performance histories; the time period covered is from about 1500 to the early 18th century.

Masks and Masking

Masks and Masking PDF Author: Gary Edson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476612331
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
For at least 20,000 years, masking has been a mark of cultural evolution and an indication of magical-religious sophistication in society. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the mask as a powerful cultural phenomenon--a means by which human groupings attempted to communicate their dignity and sense of purpose, as well as establish a continuum between the natural and supernatural worlds. It addresses the distinctive environments within which masks flourished, and analyzes the mask as a manifestation of art, ethnology and anthropology.

A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350 - c.1500

A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350 - c.1500 PDF Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405195525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description
A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350-c.1500 challenges readers to think beyond a narrowly defined canon and conventional disciplinary boundaries. A ground-breaking collection of newly-commissioned essays on medieval literature and culture. Encourages students to think beyond a narrowly defined canon and conventional disciplinary boundaries. Reflects the erosion of the traditional, rigid boundary between medieval and early modern literature. Stresses the importance of constructing contexts for reading literature. Explores the extent to which medieval literature is in dialogue with other cultural products, including the literature of other countries, manuscripts and religion. Includes close readings of frequently-studied texts, including texts by Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain poet, and Hoccleve. Confronts some of the controversies that exercise students of medieval literature, such as those connected with literary theory, love, and chivalry and war.

The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City

The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City PDF Author: Pamela M. King
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843840987
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
An investigation into the connections between the York Plays, religious observance, and the role played by the city itself.

Shakespeare / Play

Shakespeare / Play PDF Author: Emma Whipday
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350304441
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.

The York Corpus Christi Plays

The York Corpus Christi Plays PDF Author: Clifford Davidson
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580444539
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description
The feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated annually on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was devoted to the Eucharist, and the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city with the Host, the consecrated wafer that was believed to have been transformed into the true body and blood of Jesus. In this way the "cultus Dei" thus celebrated allowed the people to venerate the Eucharistic bread in order that they might be stimulated to devotion and brought symbolically, even mystically into a relationship with the central moments of salvation history. Perhaps it is logical, therefore, that pageants and plays were introduced in order to access yet another way of visualizing and participating in those events. Thus the "invisible things" of the divine order "from the creation of the world" might be displayed. The York Corpus Christi Plays, contained in London, British Library, MS. Add. 35290 and comprising more than thirteen thousand lines of verse, actually represent a unique survival of medieval theater. They form the only complete play cycle verifiably associated with the feast of Corpus Christi that is extant and was performed at a specific location in England.

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare PDF Author: Robert Hornback
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843560
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
From the late-medieval period through to the seventeenth century, English theatrical clowns carried a weighty cultural significance, only to have it stripped from them, sometimes violently, by the close of the Renaissance when the famed "license" of fooling was effectively revoked. This groundbreaking survey of clown traditions in the period looks both at their history, and reveals their hidden cultural contexts and legacies; it has far-reaching implications not only for our general understanding of English clown types, but also their considerable role in defining social, religious and racial boundaries. It begins with an exploration of previously un-noted early representations of blackness in medieval psalters, cycle plays, and Tudor interludes, arguing that they are emblematic of folly and ignorance rather than of evil. Subsequent chapters show how protestants at Cambridge and at court, during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward, patronised a clownish, iconoclastic Lord of Misrule; look at the Elizabethan puritan stage clown; and move on to a provocative reconsideration of the Fool in King Lear, drawing completely fresh conclusions. Finally, the epilogue points to the satirical clowning which took place surreptitiously in the Interregnum, and the (sometimes violent) end of "licensed" folly. Professor ROBERT HORNBACK teaches in the Departments of Literature and Theatre at Oglethorpe University.

The Aesthetics of Antichrist

The Aesthetics of Antichrist PDF Author: John Parker
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801463548
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe wrote a profoundly religious drama despite the theater's newfound secularism and his own reputation for anti-Christian irreverence. The Aesthetics of Antichrist explores this apparent paradox by suggesting that, long before Marlowe, Christian drama and ritual performance had reveled in staging the collapse of Christianity into its historical opponents—paganism, Judaism, worldliness, heresy. By embracing this tradition, Marlowe's work would at once demonstrate the theatricality inhering in Christian worship and, unexpectedly, resacralize the commercial theater. The Antichrist myth in particular tells of an impostor turned prophet: performing Christ's life, he reduces the godhead to a special effect yet in so doing foretells the real second coming. Medieval audiences, as well as Marlowe's, could evidently enjoy the constant confusion between true Christianity and its empty look-alikes for that very reason: mimetic degradation anticipated some final, as yet deferred revelation. Mere theater was a necessary prelude to redemption. The versions of the myth we find in Marlowe and earlier drama actually approximate, John Parker argues, a premodern theory of the redemptive effect of dramatic representation itself. Crossing the divide between medieval and Renaissance theater while drawing heavily on New Testament scholarship, Patristics, and research into the apocrypha, The Aesthetics of Antichrist proposes a wholesale rereading of pre-Shakespearean drama.

From Chaucer's Pardoner to Shakespeare's Iago

From Chaucer's Pardoner to Shakespeare's Iago PDF Author: Maik Goth
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783631564653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages the American critic Harold Bloom claims that Shakespeare drew on Chaucer's Pardoner when creating the villain Iago for his Othello. This book turns Bloom's observation of influences within the canon of Western literature into a more complex intermedial analysis of dramatic and literary traditions at the waning of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance. The discussion of verbal and non-verbal codes in Chaucer's presentation of the Pardoner and Shakespeare's depiction of Iago sheds light on the various strands of the Vice's development, and shows that Chaucer's pilgrim, who descends obliquely from the stage Vices, stands at the very beginning of the Vice tradition, while Iago is a late development of him, who adapts his role to new dramatic challenges.