Author: R. West
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403913692
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage offers a timely alternative to theatre criticism's neglect of the intensely spatial character of theatrical performance. The book shows that early modern audiences were highly aware of the spatial aspects of the stage. West examines the ways Jacobean dramatists used stage space to explore the spatial transformations of early modern society - social mobility, wandering populations, rural enclosure, sea travel, localized empirical thought. Dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Webster are scrutinized for their treatment of these controversial themes.
Author: Ralf Hertel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317050797
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
Applying current political theory on nationhood as well as methods established by recent performance studies, this study sheds new light on the role the public theatre played in the rise of English national identity around 1600. It situates selected history plays by Shakespeare and Marlowe in the context of non-fictional texts (such as historiographies, chorographies, political treatises, or dictionary entries) and cultural artefacts (such as maps or portraits), and thus highlights the circulation, and mutation, of national thought in late sixteenth-century culture. At the same time, it goes beyond a New Historicist approach by foregrounding the performative surplus of the theatre event that is so essential for the shaping of collective identity. How, this study crucially asks, does the performative art of theatre contribute to the dynamics of the formation of national identity? Although theories about the nature of nationalism vary, a majority of theorists agree that notions of a shared territory and history, as well as questions of religion, class and gender play crucial roles in the shaping of national identity. These factors inform the structure of this book, and each is examined individually. In contrast to existing publications, this inquiry does not take for granted a pre-existing national identity that simply manifested itself in the literary works of the period; nor does it proceed from preconceived notions of the playwrights’ political views. Instead, it understands the early modern stage as an essentially contested space in which conflicting political positions are played off against each other, and it inquires into how the imaginative work of negotiating these stances eventually contributed to a rising national self-awareness in the spectators.
Author: Jennifer Linhart Wood
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030122247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Winner of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society's 2021 Bevington Award for Best New Book Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and at King’s College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with the familiar self on the same frequency of vibration.
Author: Amanda Di Ponio
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319922491
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
This book examines the influence of the early modern period on Antonin Artaud’s seminal work The Theatre and Its Double, arguing that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and their early modern context are an integral part of the Theatre of Cruelty and essential to its very understanding. The chapters draw links between the early modern theatrical obsession with plague and regeneration, and how it is mirrored in Artaud’s concept of cruelty in the theatre. As a discussion of the influence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on Artaud, and the reciprocal influence of Artaud on contemporary interpretations of early modern drama, this book is an original addition to both the fields of early modern theatre studies and modern drama.
Author: Oppitz-Trotman George Oppitz-Trotman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474441742
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 399
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Book Description
Investigates the figures and materials of English tragedyKey FeaturesEstablishes a new approach to the relationship between historical performance and printed literatureComplicates the popular concept of metatheatreOffers boldly original readings of important English tragedies like Hamlet and The Spanish TragedyShows how our encounter with difficulty in the reading of revenge plays can be equivalent to an imaginative confrontation with the contradictions of early modern theatrical actionCharting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book explores how recognition of the dramatic person is involved in theatrical materiality. It shows how the moral difficulty of revenge in plays like The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi is inseparable from the difficulty of discerning human shapes in the theatre and on the page. Intervening in a wide range of current debates within early modern studies, Oppitz-Trotman argues that the origins of English tragic drama cannot be understood without considering how the common player appears in it.
Author: A. Hiscock
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230593208
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
This collection offers practical suggestions for the integration of non-Shakespearean drama into the teaching of Shakespeare. It shows both the ways in which Shakespearean drama is typical of its period and of the ways in which it is distinctive, by looking at Shakespeare and other writers who influenced and developed the genres in which he worked.
Author: M. Matei-Chesnoiu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137469412
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.
Author: Kelly J. Stage
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496204875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Early seventeenth-century London playwrights used actual locations in their comedies while simultaneously exploring London as an imagined, ephemeral, urban space. Producing Early Modern London examines this tension between representing place and producing urban space. In analyzing the theater's use of city spaces and places, Kelly J. Stage shows how the satirical comedies of the early seventeenth century came to embody the city as the city embodied the plays. Stage focuses on city plays by George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, William Haughton, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. While the conventional labels of "city comedy" or "citizen comedy" have often been applied to these plays, she argues that London comedies defy these genre categorizations because the ruptures, expansions, conflicts, and imperfections of the expanding city became a part of their form. Rather than defining the "city comedy," comedy in this period proved to be the genre of London. As the expansion of London's social space exceeded the strict confines of the "square mile," the city burgeoned into a new metropolis. The satiric comedies of this period became, in effect, playgrounds for urban experimentation. Early seventeenth-century playwrights seized the opportunity to explore the myriad ways in which London worked, taking the expected--a romance plot, a typical father-son conflict, a cross-dressing intrigue--and turning it into a multifaceted, complex story of interaction and proximity.
Author: Adam Zucker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107003083
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
An exploration of wit, witlessness and social and comic conventions in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries.
Author: S. P. Cerasano
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 0838640745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres as well as substantial reviews of books and essays dealing with medieval and early modern English drama before 1642. This volume addresses the conditions of theatrical ownership and dramatic competitionto those exploring stage movement and theatrical space.
