Magic on the Early English Stage

Magic on the Early English Stage PDF Author: Philip Butterworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521825139
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
An original investigation into conjuring tricks and stage magic on the medieval stage.

Magic on the Early English Stage

Magic on the Early English Stage PDF Author: Philip Butterworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521825139
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
An original investigation into conjuring tricks and stage magic on the medieval stage.

Her Life Historical

Her Life Historical PDF Author: Catherine Sanok
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203003
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Her Life Historical offers a major reconsideration of one of the most popular narrative forms in late medieval England—the lives of female saints—and one of the period's primary modes of interpretation—exemplarity. With lucidity and insight, Catherine Sanok shows that saints' legends served as vehicles for complex considerations of historical difference and continuity in an era of political crisis and social change. At the same time, they played a significant role in women's increasing visibility in late medieval literary culture by imagining a specifically feminine audience. Sanok proposes a new way to understand exemplarity—the repeated injunction to imitate the saints—not simply as a prescriptive mode of reading but as an encouragement to historical reflection. With groundbreaking originality, she argues that late medieval writers and readers used religious narrative, and specifically the legends of female saints, to think about the historicity of their own ethical lives and of the communities they inhabited. She explains how these narratives were used in the fifteenth century to negotiate the urgent social concerns occasioned by political instability and dynastic conflict, by the threat of heresy and the changing status of public religion, and by new kinds of social mobility and forms of collective identity. Her Life Historical also offers a fresh account of how women came to be visible participants in late medieval literary culture. The expectation that they formed a distinct audience for saints' lives and moral literature allowed medieval women to surface in the historical record as book owners, patrons, and readers. Saints' lives thereby helped to invent the idea of a gendered audience with a privileged affiliation and a specific response to a given narrative tradition.

Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama

Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama PDF Author: Elza C. Tiner
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802090826
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Since the appearance of the first volume in 1979, the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series has made available an accurate and useable transcription of all surviving documentary evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain up to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Although they are immensely valuable to scholars, the REED volumes sometimes prove difficult for students to use without considerable assistance. With this book, Elza Tiner aims to make the records accessible for classroom use. The contributors to the volume describe the various ways in which students can learn from working with these documents. Divided into five sections, the volume illustrates how specific disciplines can use the Records to provide resources for students including ways to teach the historical documents of early English drama, training students in acting and producing, historical contexts for the interpretation of literature, as well as the study of local history, women's studies, and historical linguistics. As a practical and much needed companion to the REED volumes, Teaching with the Records of Early English Drama will prove invaluable to both students and teachers of Medieval English Drama.

English Parish Drama

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

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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.

Early English Performance: Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games

Early English Performance: Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games PDF Author: John Marshall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429765010
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Covering a period of nearly 40 years’ work by the author this collection of essays in the Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies series brings the perspective of a Drama academic and practitioner of early English plays to the understanding of how medieval plays and Robin Hood games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were performed. It explores why, where, when, and how the plays happened, who took part, and who were the audiences. The insights are informed by a combination of research and the public presentation of surviving texts. The research included in the volume unites the early English experiences of religious and secular performance. This recognition challenges the dominant critical distinction of the past between the two and the consequent privileging of biblical and moral plays over secular entertainments. What further binds, rather than separates, the two is that the destination of funds raised by the different activities maintained the civic and parochial needs of the institutions upon which the people depended. This collection redefines the inclusive nature and common interests of the purposes that lay behind generically different undertakings. They shared an extraordinary investment of human and financial resources in the anticipation of a profit that was pious and practical. (CS1081).

Religion and Drama in Early Modern England

Religion and Drama in Early Modern England PDF Author: Elizabeth Williamson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317068114
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.

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.

The Reformation in English Towns, 1500-1640

The Reformation in English Towns, 1500-1640 PDF Author: John Craig
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1349268321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This volume seeks to address a relatively neglected subject in the field of English reformation studies: the reformation in its urban context. Drawing on the work of a number of historians, this collection of essays will seek to explore some of the dimensions of that urban stage and to trace, using a mixture of detailed case studies and thematic reflections, some of the ways in which religious change was both effected and affected by the activities of townsmen and women.

A Companion to Renaissance Drama

A Companion to Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Arthur F. Kinney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470998911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.

Storyworlds of Robin Hood

Storyworlds of Robin Hood PDF Author: Lesley Coote
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789142695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Robin Hood is one of the most enduring and well-known figures of English folklore. Yet who was he really? In this intriguing book, Lesley Coote reexamines the early tales about Robin in light of the stories, both English and French, that have grown up around them—stories with which they shared many elements of form and meaning. In the process, she returns to questions such as where did Robin come from, and what did these stories mean? The Robin who reveals himself is as spiritual as he is secular, and as much an insider as he is an outlaw. And in the context of current debates about national identity and Britain’s relationship with the wider world, Robin emerges to be as European as he is English—or perhaps, as Coote suggests, that is precisely the quality which made him fundamentally English all along.