Author: Dunbar H. Ogden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Book Description
Using original rubrics from some 1,200 manuscripts, this book demonstrates performance of the liturgical drama from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries. It lays out the staging space and traces the movements of the performers on architectural ground plans. The rubrics reveal a wealth of information about the creating of character through ecclesastical vestments and other costumes. It also includes a surprising range of directives for voice, gesture, and dumb show. The book provides a major theatrical source book for students and scholars in the field of drama.
The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church
Author: Dunbar H. Ogden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Book Description
Using original rubrics from some 1,200 manuscripts, this book demonstrates performance of the liturgical drama from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries. It lays out the staging space and traces the movements of the performers on architectural ground plans. The rubrics reveal a wealth of information about the creating of character through ecclesastical vestments and other costumes. It also includes a surprising range of directives for voice, gesture, and dumb show. The book provides a major theatrical source book for students and scholars in the field of drama.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Book Description
Using original rubrics from some 1,200 manuscripts, this book demonstrates performance of the liturgical drama from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries. It lays out the staging space and traces the movements of the performers on architectural ground plans. The rubrics reveal a wealth of information about the creating of character through ecclesastical vestments and other costumes. It also includes a surprising range of directives for voice, gesture, and dumb show. The book provides a major theatrical source book for students and scholars in the field of drama.
Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages
Author: O. B. Hardison Jr.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421430878
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Originally published in 1965. The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis—the earliest of all medieval dramas—is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421430878
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Originally published in 1965. The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis—the earliest of all medieval dramas—is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.
Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre
Author: Philip Butterworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107015480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Examines staging conventions in the medieval English theatre and ways in which they conditioned the reactions of the audience.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107015480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Examines staging conventions in the medieval English theatre and ways in which they conditioned the reactions of the audience.
The Amateurs
Author: Jordan Harrison
Publisher: Concord Theatricals
ISBN: 0573707847
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Book Description
An intrepid troupe of pageant players races across medieval Europe, struggling to outrun the Black Death. The arrival of a mysterious outsider sends Hollis, the leading lady, in search of answers that can only be found off-script... and soon the 14th century plague begins to look like another, more recent one. This wildly inventive and funny new work examines the evolution of human creativity in a dark age: when does a crisis destroy us, and when does it open new frontiers?
Publisher: Concord Theatricals
ISBN: 0573707847
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Book Description
An intrepid troupe of pageant players races across medieval Europe, struggling to outrun the Black Death. The arrival of a mysterious outsider sends Hollis, the leading lady, in search of answers that can only be found off-script... and soon the 14th century plague begins to look like another, more recent one. This wildly inventive and funny new work examines the evolution of human creativity in a dark age: when does a crisis destroy us, and when does it open new frontiers?
Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches
Author: Mary Désirée Anderson
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
Staging Harmony
Author: Katherine Steele Brokaw
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501705911
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England’s long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people’s reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for. The theater represented the music of the church’s present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501705911
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Book Description
In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England’s long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people’s reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for. The theater represented the music of the church’s present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.
The Medieval Church in Manuscripts
Author: Justin Clegg
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802085986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 72
Book Description
Illustrations in liturgical books, such as breviaries and missals, as well as books of private devotion, such as psalters and books of hours, reveal the world of the Church in the Middle Ages in vivid detail.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802085986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 72
Book Description
Illustrations in liturgical books, such as breviaries and missals, as well as books of private devotion, such as psalters and books of hours, reveal the world of the Church in the Middle Ages in vivid detail.
French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater
Author: Laura Weigert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316412121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
This book revives what was unique, strange and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance located not in 'theaters' but in churches, courts, and city streets and squares. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a playgoing experience that was associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of the late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316412121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
This book revives what was unique, strange and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance located not in 'theaters' but in churches, courts, and city streets and squares. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a playgoing experience that was associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of the late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.
A Primer in Theatre History
Author: William Grange
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761860045
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Book Description
A Primer in Theatre History covers productions, personalities, theories, innovations, and plays from ancient Greece to the Spanish Golden Age. Grange discusses theatre from 534 BC in Athens to 1681 AD in Madrid. The book contains highly informative chapters on theatre culture in the ancient classical world, the medieval period, the Italian Renaissance, classical Asia, German-speaking Europe, France to 1658, and England to 1642. Following a wide-ranging introduction, chapters allow the uninitiated reader straightforward access to well-researched material, often presented in a humorous and approachable fashion. Descriptions of films augment discussions of theatre, while an extended bibliography and comprehensive index assist the reader in making further inquiries. Each chapter features illustrations by Mallory Prucha, a designer and graphic illustrator who has received several awards at theatre conferences around the US. A Primer in Theatre History does not read like a scholarly tome. Its whimsical wrinkles offer readers a more contemporaneous view of theatre than is customary. It employs, for example, frequent references to movies germane to topics and time periods under discussion. Such use of film promotes familiarity among younger readers, who can then appropriate analogies to theatre performance.
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761860045
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Book Description
A Primer in Theatre History covers productions, personalities, theories, innovations, and plays from ancient Greece to the Spanish Golden Age. Grange discusses theatre from 534 BC in Athens to 1681 AD in Madrid. The book contains highly informative chapters on theatre culture in the ancient classical world, the medieval period, the Italian Renaissance, classical Asia, German-speaking Europe, France to 1658, and England to 1642. Following a wide-ranging introduction, chapters allow the uninitiated reader straightforward access to well-researched material, often presented in a humorous and approachable fashion. Descriptions of films augment discussions of theatre, while an extended bibliography and comprehensive index assist the reader in making further inquiries. Each chapter features illustrations by Mallory Prucha, a designer and graphic illustrator who has received several awards at theatre conferences around the US. A Primer in Theatre History does not read like a scholarly tome. Its whimsical wrinkles offer readers a more contemporaneous view of theatre than is customary. It employs, for example, frequent references to movies germane to topics and time periods under discussion. Such use of film promotes familiarity among younger readers, who can then appropriate analogies to theatre performance.
The York Corpus Christi Plays
Author: Clifford Davidson
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580444539
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616
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.
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580444539
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616
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.