The Acoustic World of Early Modern England

The Acoustic World of Early Modern England PDF Author: Bruce R. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226763773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Journeying into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, this text explores the physical aspects of human speech and the surrounding environment, as well as social and political structures.

The Acoustic World of Early Modern England

The Acoustic World of Early Modern England PDF Author: Bruce R. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226763773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Journeying into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, this text explores the physical aspects of human speech and the surrounding environment, as well as social and political structures.

Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England

Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England PDF Author: Deutermann Allison Deutermann
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474411274
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Examines the impact of hearing on the formal and generic development of early modern theatreEarly modern drama was in fundamental ways an aural art form. How plays should sound, and how they should be heard, were vital questions to the formal development of early modern drama. Ultimately, they shaped the two of its most popular genres: revenge tragedy and city comedy. Simply put, theatregoers were taught to hear these plays differently. Revenge tragedies by Shakespeare and Kyd imagine sound stabbing, piercing, and slicing into listeners' bodies on and off the stage; while comedies by Jonson and Marston imagine it being sampled selectively, according to taste. Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England traces the dialectical development of these two genres and auditory modes over six decades of commercial theatre history, combining surveys of the theatrical marketplace with focused attention to specific plays and to the non-dramatic literature that gives this interest in audition texture: anatomy texts, sermons, music treatises, and manuals on rhetoric and poetics.Key Features Invites new attention to the theatre as something heard, rather than as something seen, in performanceProvides a model for understanding aesthetic forms as developing in competitive response to one another in particular historical circumstancesEnriches our sense of early modern playgoers' auditory experience, and of dramatists' attempt to shape it

Travel and Drama in Early Modern England

Travel and Drama in Early Modern England PDF Author: Claire Jowitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108678742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provides new insights into Renaissance stage practice, performance history, and theatre's transnational exchanges. It advances our understanding of theatre history, drama's generic conventions, and what constitutes plays about travel at a time when the professional theatre was rapidly developing and England was attempting to announce its presence within a global economy. Recent critical studies have shown that the reach of early modern travel was global in scope, and its cultural consequences more important than narratives that are dominated by the Atlantic world suggest. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars redefines the field by expanding the canon of recognized plays concerned with travel. Re-assessing the parameters of the genre, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on how these plays communicated with their audiences and readers.

Gender and Song in Early Modern England

Gender and Song in Early Modern England PDF Author: Leslie C. Dunn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317130472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Song offers a vital case study for examining the rich interplay of music, gender, and representation in the early modern period. This collection engages with the question of how gender informed song within particular textual, social, and spatial contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Bringing together ongoing work in musicology, literary studies, and film studies, it elaborates an interdisciplinary consideration of the embodied and gendered facets of song, and of song’s capacity to function as a powerful-and flexible-gendered signifier. The essays in this collection draw vivid attention to song as a situated textual and musical practice, and to the gendered processes and spaces of song's circulation and reception. In so doing, they interrogate the literary and cultural significance of song for early modern readers, performers, and audiences.

The Matter of Song in Early Modern England

The Matter of Song in Early Modern England PDF Author: Katherine R. Larson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192581937
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Given the variety and richness of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English 'songscape', it might seem unsurprising to suggest that early modern song needs to be considered as sung. When a reader encounters a song in a sonnet sequence, a romance, and even a masque or a play, however, the tendency is to engage with it as poem rather than as musical performance. Opening up the notion of song from a performance-based perspective The Matter of Song in Early Modern England considers the implications of reading song not simply as lyric text but as an embodied and gendered musical practice. Animating the traces of song preserved in physiological and philosophical commentaries, singing handbooks, poetic treatises, and literary texts ranging from Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalmes to John Milton's Comus, the book confronts song's ephemerality, its lexical and sonic capriciousness, and its airy substance. These features can resist critical analysis but were vital to song's affective workings in the early modern period. The volume foregrounds the need to attend much more closely to the embodied and musical dimensions of literary production and circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It also makes an important and timely contribution to our understanding of women's engagement with song as writers and as performers. A companion recording of fourteen songs featuring Larson (soprano) and Lucas Harris (lute) brings the project's innovative methodology and central case studies to life.

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England PDF Author: Allison P. Hobgood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107783054
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Allison P. Hobgood tells a new story about the emotional experiences of theatregoers in Renaissance England. Through detailed case studies of canonical plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Kyd and Heywood, the reader will discover what it felt like to be part of performances in English theatre and appreciate the key role theatregoers played in the life of early modern drama. How were spectators moved - by delight, fear or shame, for example - and how did their own reactions in turn make an impact on stage performances? Addressing these questions and many more, this book discerns not just how theatregoers were altered by drama's affective encounters, but how they were undeniable influences upon those encounters. Overall, Hobgood reveals a unique collaboration between the English world and stage, one that significantly reshapes the ways we watch, read and understand early modern drama.

Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England

Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England PDF Author: S. Clark
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230000622
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Clark explores how real-life women's crimes were handled in the news media of an age before the invention of the newspaper, in ballads, pamphlets, and plays. It discusses those features of contemporary society which particularly influenced early modern crime reporting, such as attitudes to news, the law and women's rights, and ideas about the responsibility of the community for keeping order. It considers the problems of writing about transgressive women for audiences whose ideal woman was chaste, silent, and obedient.

Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England

Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England PDF Author: Elizabeth L. Swann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Pioneering investigation into relationship between physical sense of taste, and taste as a term denoting judgement, in early modern England.

Voice in Motion

Voice in Motion PDF Author: Gina Bloom
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201310
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Voice in Motion explores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts—including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid—Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as "unruly matter" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world. Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.

Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England

Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England PDF Author: Simon Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489052
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Offers a new, interdisciplinary account of early modern drama through the lens of playing and playgoing.