Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton

Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton PDF Author: Swapan Chakravorty
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This detailed reassessment of Middleton's importance examines the writer's dramatic texts to demonstrate how he revealed the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex morality, society and politics.

Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton

Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton PDF Author: Swapan Chakravorty
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This detailed reassessment of Middleton's importance examines the writer's dramatic texts to demonstrate how he revealed the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex morality, society and politics.

Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton

Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton PDF Author: Swapan Chakravorty
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 019159170X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A comprehensive reassessment of Middleton's cultural importance, this wide-ranging study examines both the writer's dramatic and non-dramatic texts to show how he laid bare the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex, morality, society, and politics in late feudal culture. Middleton's importance has long been acknowledged in the modern theatre, but academic criticism still seems distracted by questions regarding his morals and `Puritanism'. Swapan Chakravorty argues again the reductivism of such enquiries, and demonstrates the complexity behind the texts' disengagement from received ideological premises and gneric formulae. Combining close reading with lively historical analysis, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton reveals Middleton to have been a pioneer of politically self-conscious theatre. Full of insight, this study brings alive the plays' meanings by engaging with the social, political, and cultural concerns of Middleton's day.

Five Plays

Five Plays PDF Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140432190
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) was one of the most prolific and fascinating playwrights of the Jacobean era, producing nearly fifty theatrical pieces in a quarter of a century. This collection comprises five of his most powerful plays, from the comedies satirizing city life, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, to his later tragedies Women Beware Women and The Changeling, in which Middleton reveals a world dominated by the corrupting power of lust and subject to the futility of human pretensions. Also included is The Revenger's Tragedy, originally ascribed to Cyril Tourneur, a Revenge Play infused with sardonic wit and biting irony.

Gaming the Stage

Gaming the Stage PDF Author: Gina Bloom
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472123912
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England's first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport arenas. In the first book-length exploration of gaming in the early modern period, Gina Bloom shows that theaters succeeded in London's new entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing a game were similar experiences. Audiences did not just see a play; they were encouraged to play the play, and knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining dramas written for these theaters alongside evidence of analog games popular then and today, Bloom argues for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology. Gaming the Stage also introduces a new archive for game studies: scenes of onstage gaming, which appear at climactic moments in dramatic literature. Bloom reveals plays to be systems of information for theater spectators: games of withholding, divulging, speculating, and wagering on knowledge. Her book breaks new ground through examinations of plays such as The Tempest, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and A Game at Chess; the histories of familiar games such as cards, backgammon, and chess; less familiar ones, like Game of the Goose; and even a mixed-reality theater videogame.

Social Dramas

Social Dramas PDF Author: David A. Postles
Publisher: New Acdemia+ORM
ISBN: 1955835225
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
How the repeated social tropes and paradigms of the City comedies give us an in-depth look into everyday London society in the early 17th-century. Although literature is often assumed to belong to the sphere of representation rather than constituting an accurate reflection of social reality, early-modern English drama can tell us much about social attitudes in the early seventeenth century. The City comedies were, in particular, composed by authors who were embedded in the mundane social existence of London, in its quotidian transactions and exchanges, in its less salubrious contexts of debt, drinking, death and incarceration. To elucidate the complex social attitudes of the City urban elite, five particular themes are explored: the symbolism of attire; matrimonial talk; the use of money (coin) as metaphor and metonymy; “over-exuberance” towards the opportunity of the “New World”; and continuing differences of speech and customary language use. Although the dramatists had slightly differing allegiances, their commentaries all illuminate “middling” society in the City of London. “This new work by David Postles raises important questions in an innovative manner. It will certainly be welcomed by the historical community.” —Bernard Capp, FBA, Dept of History, University of Warwick “David Postles is one of the most innovative social historians writing today.” —Nigel Goose, Professor of Social and Economic History, University of Hertfordshire “This book will be significant reading for all those working in the field. It will be warmly received by readers and reviewers, and will remain a work of reference for scholars and students for the future.” —Greg Walker, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh

Jacobean Drama

Jacobean Drama PDF Author: Pascale Aebischer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350309974
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are increasingly popular thanks to a spate of recent stage and screen productions and to courses that set Shakespeare's plays in context. This Reader's Guide introduces students to the criticism and debates that are specific to the drama of playwrights such as Jonson, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. Pascale Aebischer explores recent critical developments in key areas including: - How the plays were staged and printed - Innovative editions of plays - How the plays represent and contest the dominant ideologies of the Jacobean period - Dramatic genres - The representation of the human body and of social, gender and race relations - Modern productions on stage and screen Featuring suggestions for further research and reading, and a filmography of commercially available film versions of non-Shakespearean drama, this is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the diverse plays of the Jacobean age.

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama PDF Author: Mark Kaethler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton’s dramatic works as responses to James I’s governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of Middleton’s writings, ranging from his first extant play The Phoenix (1604) to his scandalous finale A Game at Chess (1624). In the course of this investigation, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.

Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama

Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama PDF Author: Bruce Boehrer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107023157
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Bruce Boehrer's book is the first general history of the Shakespearean stage to focus primarily on ecological issues.

Thomas Middleton: Four Plays

Thomas Middleton: Four Plays PDF Author: Thomas Middleton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408174626
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
This New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Thomas Middleton's plays - Women Beware Women; The Changeling; The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside - with a new introduction by William Carroll, examining the plays in the context of early modern theatre, culture and politics, as well as their language, characters and themes. On-page commentary notes guide students to a better understanding and combine to make this an indispensable student edition ideal for study and classroom use from A Level upwards.

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare PDF Author: Michael Dobson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198708734
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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Book Description
This is a reference text on Shakespeare's works, times, life, and afterlives. It offers stimulating and authoritative coverage of every aspect of Shakespeare and his writings, including their reinterpretation in the theatre, in criticism, and in film.