Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson

Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson PDF Author: Bill Angus
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147441513X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Have you ever wondered what was really going on in the inner-plays, secret overhearing, and tacit observations of early modern drama? Taking on the shadowy figure of the early modern informer, this book argues that far more than mere artistic experimentation is happening here. In case studies of metadramatic plays, and the devices which Shakespeare and Jonson constantly revisit, this book offers critical insight into intrinsic connections between informers and authors, discovering an uneasy sense of common practice at the core of the metadrama, which drives both its self-awareness and its paranoia. Drama is most self-revealing at these moments where it reflects upon its own dramatic register: where it is most metadramatic. To understand their metadrama is therefore to understand these most seminal authors in a new way.

Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson

Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson PDF Author: Bill Angus
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147441513X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
Have you ever wondered what was really going on in the inner-plays, secret overhearing, and tacit observations of early modern drama? Taking on the shadowy figure of the early modern informer, this book argues that far more than mere artistic experimentation is happening here. In case studies of metadramatic plays, and the devices which Shakespeare and Jonson constantly revisit, this book offers critical insight into intrinsic connections between informers and authors, discovering an uneasy sense of common practice at the core of the metadrama, which drives both its self-awareness and its paranoia. Drama is most self-revealing at these moments where it reflects upon its own dramatic register: where it is most metadramatic. To understand their metadrama is therefore to understand these most seminal authors in a new way.

Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson

Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson PDF Author: Bill Angus
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474415121
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Have you ever wondered what was really going on in the inner-plays, secret overhearing, and tacit observations of early modern drama? Taking on the shadowy figure of the early modern informer, this book argues that far more than mere artistic experimentation is happening here. In case studies of metadramatic plays, and the devices which Shakespeare and Jonson constantly revisit, this book offers critical insight into intrinsic connections between informers and authors, discovering an uneasy sense of common practice at the core of the metadrama, which drives both its self-awareness and its paranoia. Drama is most self-revealing at these moments where it reflects upon its own dramatic register: where it is most metadramatic. To understand their metadrama is therefore to understand these most seminal authors in a new way.

Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre

Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre PDF Author: Bill Angus
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147443293X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre offers insight into why the early modern stage abounds with informer and intelligencer figures.

Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy

Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy PDF Author: Jonathan Goossen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351658689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy relates new understandings of Aristotle’s dramatic theory to the comedy of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Typically, scholars of Renaissance drama have treated Aristotle’s theory only as a possible historical influence on Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s drama, focusing primarily on their tragedies. Yet recent classical scholarship has undone important misconceptions about Aristotle’s Poetics held by early modern commentators and fleshed out the theory of comedy latent within it. By first synthesizing these developments and then treating them as an interpretive theory, rather than simply an historical influence, this book demonstrates a remarkable consonance between Aristotelian principles of plot and its emotional effect, on the one hand, and the comedy of Shakespeare and Jonson, on the other. In doing so, it also reveals surprising similarities between these seemingly divergent dramatists.

Reading the Road, from Shakespeare's Crossways to Bunyan's Highways

Reading the Road, from Shakespeare's Crossways to Bunyan's Highways PDF Author: Hopkins Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474454143
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Explores how cultural conceptions of mobility and the road contribute to identity and culture in early modern BritainOpens new windows on early modern culture, subjectivity and perceptions around the experience of the road and how that shapes the idea of the road itselfOffers insight into the ways both the bare boards of the stage and prose narratives were used to imagine road journeys and the intersections between public and private spaceEnhances historical understanding of the literal place of theatre in the road networks around early modern LondonProvides a crucial ligature in English literary and cultural history. The present plays and prose are prolegomena to the travel literature of Montagu, Swift, Boswell and Johnson in the Hebrides, Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Fielding's Tom Jones, and peripatetic Civil War narrativesThis book brings together thirteen essays, by both established and emerging scholars, which examine the most influential meanings of roads in early modern literature and culture. Chapters develop our understanding of the place of the road in the early modern imagination and open various windows on a geography which may by its nature seem passing or trivial but is in fact central to all conceptions of movement. They also shed new light on perhaps the most astonishing achievement of early modern plays: their use of one small, bare space to suggest an amazing variety of physical and potentially metaphysical locations.

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England PDF Author: Joseph Mansky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100936278X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, this interdisciplinary study traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, focusing especially on the theater. Ranging from Shakespeare to provincial pageantry, it provides a fresh account of early modern drama and the viral media ecosystem springing up around it.

Poison on the early modern English stage

Poison on the early modern English stage PDF Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526159910
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.

Venus’s Palace

Venus’s Palace PDF Author: Reut Barzilai
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100084952X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
This book lays bare the dialogue between Shakespeare and critics of the stage and positions it as part of an ongoing cultural, ethical, and psychological debate about the effects of performance on actors and on spectators. In so doing, the book makes a substantial contribution both to the study of representations of theatre in Shakespeare’s plays and to the understanding of ethical concerns about acting and spectating—then, and now. The book opens with a comprehensive and coherent analysis of the main early modern English anxieties about theater and its power. These are read against twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of acting, interviews with actors, and research into the effects of media representation on spectator behaviour, all of which demonstrate the lingering relevance of antitheatrical claims and the personal and philosophical implications of acting and spectating. The main part of the book reveals Shakespeare’s responses to major antitheatrical claims about the powerful effects of poetry, music, playacting, and playgoing. It also demonstrates the evolution of Shakespeare’s view of these claims over the course of his career: from light-hearted parody in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, through systematic contemplation in Hamlet, to acceptance and dramatization in The Tempest. This study will be of great interest to scholars and students of theater, English literature, history, and culture.

Interruptions in Early Modern English Drama

Interruptions in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Michael M. Wagoner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350238325
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
To interrupt, both on stage and off, is to wrest power. From the Ghost's appearance in Hamlet to Celia's frightful speech in Volpone, interruptions are an overlooked linguistic and dramatic form that delineates the balance of power within a scene. This book analyses interruptions as a specific form in dramatic literature, arguing that these everyday occurrences, when transformed into aesthetic phenomena, reveal illuminating connections: between characters, between actor and audience, and between text and reader. Focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Fletcher, Michael M. Wagoner examines interruptions that occur through the use of punctuation and stage directions, as well as through larger forms, such as conventions and dramaturgy. He demonstrates how studying interruptions may indicate aspects of authorial style – emphasizing a playwright's use and control of a text – and how exploring relative power dynamics pushes readers and audiences to reconsider key plays and characters, providing new considerations of the relationships between Othello and Iago, or Macbeth and the Ghost of Banquo.

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London PDF Author: Eric Dunnum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351252631
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience. This study analyses how, out of anxiety that unruly audiences would destroy the nascent industry of professional drama in England, playwrights sought to limit the effect that their plays could have on the audience. They tried to construct playgoing through their drama in the hopes of creating a less-reactive, more pensive, and controlled playgoer. The result was the radical experimentation in dramaturgy that, in part, defines Renaissance drama. Written for scholars of Early Modern and Renaissance Drama and Theatre, Theatre History, and Early Modern and Renaissance History, this book calls for a new focus on the local economic concerns of the theatre companies as a way to understand the motivation behind the drama of early modern London.