Medieval English Drama

Medieval English Drama PDF Author: Katie Normington
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074565486X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book Here

Book Description
Medieval English Drama provides a fresh introduction to the dramatic and festive practices of England in the late Middle Ages. The book places particular emphasis on the importance of the performance contexts of these events, bringing to life a period before permanent theatre buildings when performances took place in a wide variety of locations and had to fight to attract and maintain the attention of an audience. Showing the interplay between dramatic and everyday life, the book covers performances in convents, churches, parishes, street processions and parades, and in particular distinguishes between modes of outdoor and indoor performance. Katie Normington aids the reader to a fuller understanding of these early English dramatic practices by explaining the significance of the place of performance, the particularities of spectatorship for each event and how the conventions of the form of drama were manipulated to address its reception. Audiences considered range from cloistered members, congregations and parish members to urban citizens, nobles and royalty. Undergraduate students of literature of this period will find this an approachable and illuminating guide.

Medieval English Drama

Medieval English Drama PDF Author: Katie Normington
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074565486X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book Here

Book Description
Medieval English Drama provides a fresh introduction to the dramatic and festive practices of England in the late Middle Ages. The book places particular emphasis on the importance of the performance contexts of these events, bringing to life a period before permanent theatre buildings when performances took place in a wide variety of locations and had to fight to attract and maintain the attention of an audience. Showing the interplay between dramatic and everyday life, the book covers performances in convents, churches, parishes, street processions and parades, and in particular distinguishes between modes of outdoor and indoor performance. Katie Normington aids the reader to a fuller understanding of these early English dramatic practices by explaining the significance of the place of performance, the particularities of spectatorship for each event and how the conventions of the form of drama were manipulated to address its reception. Audiences considered range from cloistered members, congregations and parish members to urban citizens, nobles and royalty. Undergraduate students of literature of this period will find this an approachable and illuminating guide.

English Parish Drama

English Parish Drama PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004652779
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of essays presents the multiplicity of dramatic and paradramatic activity that flourished in medieval and early modern England at the parish level. The evidence here adduced is largely from churchwardens' accounts and from the records of the ecclesiastical courts. The book contains ten articles that consider the various money making ventures undertaken by English parishes for the support of the church. The authors study subjects ranging from paradramatic activities such as rushbearing, dancing and bull and bear baiting through more hybrid and problematical events such as the king games and Robin Hood gatherings and plays, to what can be considered 'true' drama with sets, props, texts and actors. All the contributors are editors in the Records of Early English Drama project and bring to their material the insights of scholars working with original material in what are still only partially charted waters. »Ludus« intends to introduce those interested in literature, in the performing arts, or in history to the various aspects of theatre and drama from the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. It publishes books on closely defined topics, mostly seen from a comparative point of view.

English Drama Before Shakespeare

English Drama Before Shakespeare PDF Author: Peter Happe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131787112X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
English Drama before Shakespeare surveys the range of dramatic activity in English up to 1590. The book challenges the traditional divisions between Medieval and Renaissance literature by showing that there was much continuity throughout this period, in spite of many innovations. The range of dramatic activity includes well-known features such as mystery cycles and the interludes, as well as comedy and tragedy. Para-dramatic activity such as the liturgical drama, royal entries and localised or parish drama is also covered. Many of the plays considered are anonymous, but a coherent, biographical view can be taken of the work of known dramatists such as John Heywood, John Bale, and Christopher Marlowe. Peter Happé's study is based upon close reading of selected plays, especially from the mystery cycles and such Elizabethan works as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. It takes account of contemporary research into dramatic form, performance (including some important recent revivals), dramatic sites and early theatre buildings, and the nature of early dramatic texts. Recent changes in outlook generated by the publication of the written records of early drama form part of the book's focus. There is an extensive bibliography covering social and political background, the lives and works of individual authors, and the development of theatrical ideas through the period. The book is aimed at undergraduates, as well as offering an overview for more advanced students and researchers in drama and in related fields of literature and cultural studies.

Gender and Medieval Drama

Gender and Medieval Drama PDF Author: Katie Normington
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9781843840275
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book Here

Book Description
Evidence from Records of Early English Drama, social, literary and cultural sources are drawn together in order to investigate how performances within the late Middle Ages were both shaped by, and shaped, the public image of women."--BOOK JACKET.

Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland

Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland PDF Author: Alan John Fletcher
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802043771
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Get Book Here

Book Description
A study of the early history of drama and performance in Ireland, from the 7th century through the 16th and 17th centuries, ending on the eve of the arrival of Oliver Cromwell.

Civic Ritual and Drama

Civic Ritual and Drama PDF Author: Wim N. M. Hüsken
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004647171
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
Late medieval and renaissance cities, though powerful communities jealous of their own jurisdiction, were constantly negotiating their relationships with other secular and religious authorities. The seven essays in this collection treat various aspects of civic display and pageantry during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The overwhelming sense one receives is that the solemne pomps were essentially about power -- how to get it, display it, share it and retain it. Each paper demonstrates how, through ceremony and symbol, municipalities sought to fashion their own corporate self-image in order to establish the limits of their authority in relationship to the countervailing powers sur-rounding them. The essays are concerned with the period before the ever widening impact of the Reformation and the intellectual and political revolutions it spawned had reached the level of civic pageantry. In the varied rituals considered here we can see reflected the highly sophisticated minds of their creators using the symbolic landscape of their religious and cultural past in important acts of corporate self-fashioning.

Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485-1660

Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485-1660 PDF Author: Paul Whitfield White
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521856698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines theatre and religion in provincial England from the early Tudors to 1660.

Catalog of the Theatre and Drama Collections

Catalog of the Theatre and Drama Collections PDF Author: New York Public Library. Research Libraries
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1136

Get Book Here

Book Description


Interludes and Early Modern Society

Interludes and Early Modern Society PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401205892
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this collection, contributed by an internationally distinguished group of scholars, bring up to date many aspects of the criticism of the English Interludes. The development of these plays was a significant part of the history of the growth of English drama in the sixteenth century to the extent that they may be regarded as its main stream. Arising by means of a felicitous combination of the development of printing and the growth of a professional theatre, plays of this type quickly became a forum for the presentation and exploration of many contemporary themes. They became a useful means of disseminating a wide variety of opinions and public concerns as well as exhibiting at times the intellectual brilliance of the Renaissance. The essays here are concentrated upon power, particularly in its religious and political aspects, gender and theatricality. The political and religious upheavals of the Reformation under the Tudor monarchy form a background as well as a focus at times. In particular the position of women in sixteenth-century society is examined in essays on several plays. There is also discussion of the development of theatrical techniques as playwrights worked closely with small acting companies to reach a wide audience ranging from the royal court to the common streets. This was achieved, as a number of essays make clear, through a variety of entertaining theatrical devices.

Region, Religion and Patronage

Region, Religion and Patronage PDF Author: Richard Dutton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719063695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
This groundbreaking book uses the possibility that Shakespeare began his theatrical career in Lancashire to open up a range of new contexts for reading the plays, and introduces readers to the non-metropolitan theater spaces which formed a vital part of early modern dramatic activity. Essays give a detailed picture of the contexts in which the apprentice dramatist would have worked, providing new insights into regional performance, touring theatre, the patronage of the Earls of Derby, and the purpose-built theater at Prescot.