Blackfriars in Early Modern London

Blackfriars in Early Modern London PDF Author: Christopher Highley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192846973
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Blackfriars: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood in Early Modern London is a cultural history of an urban enclave best known in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the incongruous juxtaposition of playing and godly preaching. As the former site of one of London's great religious houses, the post-Reformation Blackfriars was a Liberty free from mayoral control. The legal exemptions and privileges enjoyed by its residents helped attract an unusual mix of groups and activities. Zealous preachers and puritan parishioners mingled with playhouse workers and playgoers, as well as with the immigrant 'strangers' who settled here. The book focuses on local playhouse-church relations and asks how a theatrical culture was able to flourish in a parish dominated by committed puritans. Physically, the church of St Anne's and the playhouse were virtually next-door, but ideologically they seemed poles apart. Yet despite the occasional efforts of some residents to close the playhouse, godly religion and commercial playing managed to coexist. In explanation, the book examines the conflicting economic and ideological priorities of residents and the overriding desire to promote order and neighborliness. More provocatively, I argue that the Blackfriars pulpit and stage could be mutually reinforcing sites of performance. Preachers as well as playwrights exploited the Liberty's vexed relations with authority to air satirical and dissident views of the established church and state. By examining Blackfriars sermons and plays side-by-side, the book reveals a synergy between two institutions usually considered implacable enemies.

Blackfriars in Early Modern London

Blackfriars in Early Modern London PDF Author: Christopher Highley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192846973
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
Blackfriars: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood in Early Modern London is a cultural history of an urban enclave best known in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the incongruous juxtaposition of playing and godly preaching. As the former site of one of London's great religious houses, the post-Reformation Blackfriars was a Liberty free from mayoral control. The legal exemptions and privileges enjoyed by its residents helped attract an unusual mix of groups and activities. Zealous preachers and puritan parishioners mingled with playhouse workers and playgoers, as well as with the immigrant 'strangers' who settled here. The book focuses on local playhouse-church relations and asks how a theatrical culture was able to flourish in a parish dominated by committed puritans. Physically, the church of St Anne's and the playhouse were virtually next-door, but ideologically they seemed poles apart. Yet despite the occasional efforts of some residents to close the playhouse, godly religion and commercial playing managed to coexist. In explanation, the book examines the conflicting economic and ideological priorities of residents and the overriding desire to promote order and neighborliness. More provocatively, I argue that the Blackfriars pulpit and stage could be mutually reinforcing sites of performance. Preachers as well as playwrights exploited the Liberty's vexed relations with authority to air satirical and dissident views of the established church and state. By examining Blackfriars sermons and plays side-by-side, the book reveals a synergy between two institutions usually considered implacable enemies.

Producing Early Modern London

Producing Early Modern London PDF Author: Kelly J. Stage
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496201817
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
"Producing Early Modern London analyzes theater's use of city spaces and places, showing how the satirical comedies of the early seventeenth century came to embody the city as the city embodied the plays"--

Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London

Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London PDF Author: Christopher D'Addario
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009121022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Tracing the demonstrative aesthetic shift in literary writings of fashionable London during the late 1590s, this book argues that the new forms which emerged during this period were intimately linked, arising out of a particular set of geographic, intellectual, and social circumstances that existed in these urban environs. In providing a cohesive view of these disparate generic interventions, Christopher D'Addario breaks new ground in significant ways. By paying attention to the relationship between environment and individual imagination, he provides a fresh and detailed sense of the spaces and social worlds in which the writings of prominent authors, including Thomas Nashe and John Donne, were produced and experienced. In arguing that the rise of the metaphysical aesthetic occurred across a number of urban genres throughout the 1590s, not just in lyric, but also earlier in Nashe's prose, as well as in the verse satire, he rewrites English Renaissance literary history itself.

Plotting Early Modern London

Plotting Early Modern London PDF Author: Dieter Mehl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351910698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
With the publication of Brian Gibbons's Jacobean City Comedy thirty-five years ago, the urban satires by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton attained their 'official status as a Renaissance subgenre' that was distinct, by its farcical humour and ironic tone, from 'citizen comedy' or 'London drama' more generally. This retrospective genre-building has proved immensely fruitful in the study of early modern English drama; and although city comedies may not yet rival Shakespeare's plays in the amount of editorial work and critical acclaim they receive, both the theatrical contexts and the dramatic complexity of the genre itself, and its interrelations with Shakespearean drama justly command an increasing level of attention. Looking at a broad range of plays written between the 1590s and the 1630s - master-pieces of the genre like Eastward Ho, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Dutch Courtesan and The Devil is an Ass, blends of romance and satire like The Shoemaker's Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and bourgeois oddities in the Shakespearean manner like The London Prodigal - the twelve essays in this volume re-examine city comedy in the light of recently foregrounded historical contexts such as early modern capitalism, urban culture, the Protestant Reformation, and playhouse politics. Further, they explore the interrelations between city comedy and Shakespearean comedy both from the perspective of author rivalry and in terms of modern adaptations: the twenty-first-century concept of 'popular Shakespeare' (above all in the movie sector) seems to realign the comparatively time- and placeless Shakespearean drama with the gritty, noisy and bustling urban scene that has been city comedy's traditional preserve.

Shakespeare's Two Playhouses

Shakespeare's Two Playhouses PDF Author: Sarah Dustagheer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108118283
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
In what ways did playwrights like Shakespeare respond to the two urban locations of the Globe and the Blackfriars? What was the effect of their different acoustic and visual experiences on actors and audiences? What did the labels 'public' for the Globe and 'private' for the Blackfriars, actually mean in practice? Sarah Dustagheer offers the first in-depth, comparative analysis of the performance conditions of the two sites. This engaging study examines how the social, urban, sensory and historical characteristics of these playhouses affected dramatists, audiences and actors. Each chapter provides new interpretations of seminal King's Men's works written as the company began to perform in both settings, including The Alchemist, The Tempest and Henry VIII. Presenting a rich and compelling account of the two early modern theatres, the book also suggests fresh insights into recent contemporary productions at Shakespeare's Globe, London and the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age

A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age PDF Author: Robert Henke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350135372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
For both producers and consumers of theatre in the early modern era, art was viewed as a social rather than an individual activity. Emerging in the context of new capitalistic modes of production, the birth of the nation state and the rise of absolute monarchies, theatre also proved a highly mobile medium across geolinguistic boundaries. This volume provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of theatre from 1400 to 1650, and examines the socioeconomically heterodox nature of theatre and performance during this period. Highly illustrated with 48 images, the ten chapters each take a different theme as their focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage PDF Author: Andrew Bozio
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198846568
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The way that characters in early modern theatrical performance think through their surroundings is important in our understanding of perception, memory, and other forms of embodied affective thought. This book explores this concept in dramatic works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson.

Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama

Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Anthony Ellis
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754665786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
As it considers early modern medical theories, sexual myths, and intergenerational conflicts, this book traces the development of the comic old man character in Renaissance comedy, from his many incarnations in Venice and Florence to his popularity on the English stage. As Anthony Ellis shows how English dramatists adapted an Italian model to portray concerns about growing old, he sheds new light on early modern society's complex attitudes toward aging.

Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London

Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London PDF Author: Anna Bayman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317010515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Thomas Dekker (c.1572-1632) was a prolific playwright and pamphleteer chiefly remembered for his vivid and witty portrayals of everyday London life. This book uses Dekker’s prose pamphlets (published between 1613 and 1628) as a way in to a crucial and relatively neglected period of the history of pamphleteering. Under James I, after the aggressive Elizabethan exploitation of the new media, pamphleteers carved out a discursive space in which claims about truth and authority could be deconstructed. Avoiding the dangerous polemic employed by the Marprelate pamphleteers, they utilised playful, deliberately ambiguous language that drew readers’ attention to their own literary devices and games. Dekker shows pamphlets to be unstable and roguish, and the nakedly commercial imperatives of the book trade to be central to the world of Jacobean cheap print, as he introduces us to a world in which overlapping and competing discourses jostled for position in London’s streets, markets and pulpits. Contributing to the history of print and to the history of Jacobean London, this book also provides an appraisal of the often misunderstood prose works of an author who deserves more attention, especially from historians, than he has so far received. Critics are slowly becoming aware that Dekker was not the straightforward, simple hack writer of so many accounts; his works are complex and richly reward study in their own right as well as in the context of his more famous predecessors and contemporaries. As such this book will further contribute to a post-revisionist historiography of political consciousness and print cultures under the early Stuarts, as well as illuminate the career of a neglected writer.

Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater

Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater PDF Author: Lauren Robertson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100922512X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Lauren Robertson's original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater's representational practices, Robertson uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of playgoing experience in this period. Doubt was not merely the purview of Hamlet and other onstage characters, but was in fact constitutive of spectators' imaginative participation in performance. Within a culture in the midst of extreme epistemological upheaval, the commercial theater licensed spectators' suspension among opposed possibilities, transforming dubiety itself into exuberantly enjoyable, spectacular show. Robertson shows that the playhouse was a site for the entertainment of uncertainty in a double sense: its pleasures made the very trial of unknowing possible.