Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance

Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance PDF Author: Hero Chalmers
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719063381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time.The Wild Goose Chase (1621) and The Bird in a Cage (1633) were both performed in the commercial London theatres in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a so-called 'closet' drama, designed primarily for reading but drawing on a tradition of aristocratic theatricals. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor in the Restoration.The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a rich sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture.

Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance

Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance PDF Author: Hero Chalmers
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719063381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time.The Wild Goose Chase (1621) and The Bird in a Cage (1633) were both performed in the commercial London theatres in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a so-called 'closet' drama, designed primarily for reading but drawing on a tradition of aristocratic theatricals. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor in the Restoration.The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a rich sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture.

Women Playwrights of Early Modern Spain

Women Playwrights of Early Modern Spain PDF Author: Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán
Publisher: Iter Press
ISBN: 9780866985567
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume presents ten plays by three leading women playwrights of Spain’s Golden Age. Included are four bawdy and outrageous comic interludes; a full-length comedy involving sorcery, chivalry, and dramatic stage effects; and five short religious plays satirizing daily life in the convent. A critical introduction to the volume positions these women and their works in the world of seventeenth-century Spain.

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647 PDF Author: Barbara Wooding
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317110641
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Even for scholars who have devoted their careers to the early modern theatre, the name John Lowin may not instantly evoke recognition-until now, the actor's life and contribution to the theatre of the period has never been the subject of a full-length publication. In this study, Barbara Wooding provides a comprehensive overview of the life and times of Lowin, a leader of the King's Men's Company and one of the greatest actors of the seventeenth century. She examines his involvement in the Jacobean/Caroline world as performer, citizen and company manager, and contextualizes his life and career within the socio-economic and political framework of the period. Although references to him in the archives are patchy and sporadic, information about his activities within the King's Men's Company is well documented. In the course of analysing less familiar plays of the period and the characters Lowin played in them, Wooding supplements critical understanding of the scope and range of Caroline drama. Because Lowin's career burgeoned after Shakespeare's and Burbage's death, his life in Southwark and his career with the same company furnishes the opportunity for an examination of the changing status of actors, and the exercising of their skills within the drama of the later playhouse period.

The 1630s

The 1630s PDF Author: Ian Atherton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719071584
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Examining the Caroline era - a period of great importance to English history in the build-up to the Civil War, these essays address politics, religion, the monarchy, culture, literature, and art history.

New Directions in Early Modern English Drama

New Directions in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Aidan Norrie
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513745
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Recent scholarship has begun to think more critically about the edge, particularly in relation to the canon and canonicity. This book demonstrates that the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theaters, and audiences. The book engages with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality to acknowledge and extend the rich sense of playmaking and all its ancillary activities that have emerged over the last decade. The essays by a global team of scholars bring to life people and practices that flourished on the edge, manifesting their importance to both early modern audiences, and to current readers and performers.

Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623–1660: Volume 2

Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623–1660: Volume 2 PDF Author: Stephen B. Dobranski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108318088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 738

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Book Description
The early modern period in Britain was defined by tremendous upheaval - the upending of monarchy, the unsettling of church doctrine, and the pursuit of a new method of inquiry based on an inductive experimental model. Political Turmoil: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1623–1660 offers an innovative and ambitious re-appraisal of seventeenth-century British literature and history. Each of the contributors attempts to address the 'how' and 'why' of aesthetic change by focusing on political and cultural transformations. Instead of forging a grand narrative of continuity, the contributors attempt to piece together the often complex web of factors and events that contributed to developments in literary form and matter - as well as the social and religious changes that literature sometimes helped to occasion. These twenty chapters, reading across traditional periodization, demonstrate that early modern literary works - when they were conceived, as they were created, and after they circulated - were, above all, involved in various types of transitions.

Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars

Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars PDF Author: Heidi Craig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009224042
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Focusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.

Travel and Drama in Early Modern England

Travel and Drama in Early Modern England PDF Author: Claire Jowitt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108471188
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Offers new ways to conceptualize the relationship between early modern travel and drama, and re-assesses how travel drama is defined.

James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre

James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre PDF Author: Barbara Ravelhofer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317111524
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
James Shirley was the last great dramatist of the English Renaissance, shining out among other luminaries such as John Ford, Ben Jonson, or Richard Brome. This collection considers Shirley within the culture of his time, and highlights his contribution to seventeenth-century English literature as poet and playwright. Individual essays explore Shirley’s musical theatre and spoken verse, performance conditions, female agency and politics, and the presentation of his work in manuscript and print. Collectively, the essays assemble a larger picture of Caroline drama, showing it to be more than simply a nostalgic endgame, its poets daintily sipping hemlock on the eve of the Civil Wars. Shirley’s literary versatility and long life, spanning the last days of Queen Elizabeth I to the ascension of Charles II, make him an ideal writer through whom to examine the distinctive qualities of Caroline theatre.

Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque

Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque PDF Author: J. Knowles
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137432012
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Politics and Political Culture in the Court Masque considers the interconnections of the masque and political culture. It examines how masques responded to political forces and voices beyond the court, and how masques explored the limits of political speech in the Jacobean and Caroline periods.