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Author: Kim Gilchrist
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350163368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Staging Britain's Past is the first study of the early modern performance of Britain's pre-Roman history. The mythic history of the founding of Britain by the Trojan exile Brute and the subsequent reign of his descendants was performed through texts such as Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc, Shakespeare's King Lear and Cymbeline, as well as civic pageants, court masques and royal entries such as Elizabeth I's 1578 entry to Norwich. Gilchrist argues for the power of performed history to shape early modern conceptions of the past, ancestry, and national destiny, and demonstrates how the erosion of the Brutan histories marks a transformation in English self-understanding and identity. When published in 1608, Shakespeare's King Lear claimed to be a “True Chronicle History”. Lear was said to have ruled Britain centuries before the Romans, a descendant of the mighty Trojan Brute who had conquered Britain and slaughtered its barbaric giants. But this was fake history. Shakespeare's contemporaries were discovering that Brute and his descendants, once widely believed as proof of glorious ancient origins, were a mischievous medieval invention. Offering a comprehensive account of the extraordinary theatrical tradition that emerged from these Brutan histories and the reasons for that tradition's disappearance, this study gathers all known evidence of the plays, pageants and masques portraying Britain's ancient rulers. Staging Britain's Past reveals how the loss of England's Trojan origins is reflected in plays and performances from Gorboduc's powerful invocation of history to Cymbeline's elegiac erosion of all notions of historical truth.
Author: Kim Gilchrist
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350163368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Get Book Here
Book Description
Staging Britain's Past is the first study of the early modern performance of Britain's pre-Roman history. The mythic history of the founding of Britain by the Trojan exile Brute and the subsequent reign of his descendants was performed through texts such as Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc, Shakespeare's King Lear and Cymbeline, as well as civic pageants, court masques and royal entries such as Elizabeth I's 1578 entry to Norwich. Gilchrist argues for the power of performed history to shape early modern conceptions of the past, ancestry, and national destiny, and demonstrates how the erosion of the Brutan histories marks a transformation in English self-understanding and identity. When published in 1608, Shakespeare's King Lear claimed to be a “True Chronicle History”. Lear was said to have ruled Britain centuries before the Romans, a descendant of the mighty Trojan Brute who had conquered Britain and slaughtered its barbaric giants. But this was fake history. Shakespeare's contemporaries were discovering that Brute and his descendants, once widely believed as proof of glorious ancient origins, were a mischievous medieval invention. Offering a comprehensive account of the extraordinary theatrical tradition that emerged from these Brutan histories and the reasons for that tradition's disappearance, this study gathers all known evidence of the plays, pageants and masques portraying Britain's ancient rulers. Staging Britain's Past reveals how the loss of England's Trojan origins is reflected in plays and performances from Gorboduc's powerful invocation of history to Cymbeline's elegiac erosion of all notions of historical truth.
Author: Amy Lidster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651725X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Showing how overlooked publication agents constructed and read early modern history plays, this book fundamentally re-evaluates the genre.
Author: Daniel O'Quinn
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801879616
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
At the same time, official speeches and proceedings on colonial practices, such as the public trials of Clive and Hastings, became theatrical events themselves."--Jacket.
Author: Michael Burden
Publisher: Bodleian Library
ISBN: 9781851244560
Category : PERFORMING ARTS
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, historical subjects became some of the most popular topics for stage dramas of all kinds on both sides of the Atlantic. The medium of drama ensured that the telling of these histories--the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, for example, or the travels of Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus--were brought to life through words, music and spectacle. The scale of the productions was often ambitious: a water tank with model floating ships was deployed at Sadler's Wells for the staging of the Siege of Gibraltar, and another production on the same theme used live cannons which set fire to the vessels in each performance. Exploring contemporary theatrical documents and images including playbills, set designs, musical scores and prints, this illustrated collection of essays examines a number of extraordinary dramatic productions and casts light on their role in shaping a popular interpretation of historical events."--
Author: Esin Akalin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 3838269195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
In the wake of the fear that gripped Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, English dramatists, like their continental counterparts, began representing the Ottoman Turks in plays inspired by historical events. The Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided English audiences with a common experience of fascination and fear of the Other. The stereotyping of the Turks in these plays—revolving around complex themes such as tyranny, captivity, war, and conquests—arose from their perception of Islam. The Ottomans' failure in the second siege of Vienna in 1683 led to the reversal of trends in the representation of the Turks on stage. As the ascending strength of a web of European alliances began to check Ottoman expansion, what then began to dazzle the aesthetic imagination of eighteenth century England was the sultan's seraglio with images of extravaganza and decadence. In this book, Esin Akalin draws upon a selective range of seventeenth and eighteenth century plays to reach an understanding, both from a non-European perspective and Western standpoint, how one culture represents the other through discourse, historiography, and drama. The book explores a cluster of issues revolving around identity and difference in terms of history, ideology, and the politics of representation. In contextualizing political, cultural, and intellectual roots in the ideology of representing the Ottoman/Muslim as the West’s Other, the author tackles with the questions of how history serves literature and to what extent literature creates history.
Author: Sarah Johnson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350272426
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Extreme violence scarred the early modern period. Contemporary commentators grappled to find language to categorize the massacres, genocides, assassinations, enslavements, sacks, rapes, riots and regicides that characterized the period. Some used 'outrages', others 'cruelties', but, significantly, the term 'atrocity' that we use today gained the most currency. Atrocity in Early Modern English Drama intervenes in the broad field of violence and early modern drama by placing acts of atrocity at its centre. In doing so, this essay collection offers the first book-length examination of atrocities and early modern English drama. The volume considers atrocity in early theatre, its varied representations in contemporary Shakespeare performance, and strategies for teaching early modern atrocity drama. Contributors introduce us to atrocity in the works of Shakespeare, John Fletcher, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton across a range of forms including comedy, tragedy, revenge, cinematic adaptation, documentary film and contemporary theatre. The collection addresses the intersections of atrocities through class, crime, gender, race and the natural world. Together, the chapters interrogate how early modern English drama reflects upon and shapes understandings of the historically contingent, politically loaded and culturally contentious phenomena of atrocity.
Author: Murat Ögütcü
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350300470
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama. This volume re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting representations of the East were communicated on stage through the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance effects. The collection emphasizes these material aspects of dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John Fletcher's The Island Princess.
Author: Michael M. Wagoner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350238325
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
To interrupt, both on stage and off, is to wrest power. From the Ghost's appearance in Hamlet to Celia's frightful speech in Volpone, interruptions are an overlooked linguistic and dramatic form that delineates the balance of power within a scene. This book analyses interruptions as a specific form in dramatic literature, arguing that these everyday occurrences, when transformed into aesthetic phenomena, reveal illuminating connections: between characters, between actor and audience, and between text and reader. Focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Fletcher, Michael M. Wagoner examines interruptions that occur through the use of punctuation and stage directions, as well as through larger forms, such as conventions and dramaturgy. He demonstrates how studying interruptions may indicate aspects of authorial style – emphasizing a playwright's use and control of a text – and how exploring relative power dynamics pushes readers and audiences to reconsider key plays and characters, providing new considerations of the relationships between Othello and Iago, or Macbeth and the Ghost of Banquo.
Author: Jennifer Schacker
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814345921
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Examines pantomime and theatricality in nineteenth-century histories of folklore and the fairy tale. In nineteenth-century Britain, the spectacular and highly profitable theatrical form known as "pantomime" was part of a shared cultural repertoire and a significant medium for the transmission of stories. Rowdy, comedic, and slightly risqué, pantomime productions were situated in dynamic relationship with various forms of print and material culture. Popular fairy-tale theater also informed the production and reception of folklore research in ways that are often overlooked. In Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime, Jennifer Schacker reclaims the place of theatrical performance in this history, developing a model for the intermedial and cross-disciplinary study of narrative cultures. The case studies that punctuate each chapter move between the realms of print and performance, scholarship and popular culture. Schacker examines pantomime productions of such well-known tales as "Cinderella," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Jack and the Beanstalk," as well as others whose popularity has waned—such as, "Daniel O'Rourke" and "The Yellow Dwarf." These productions resonate with traditions of impersonation, cross-dressing, literary imposture, masquerade, and the social practice of "fancy dress." Schacker also traces the complex histories of Mother Goose and Mother Bunch, who were often cast as the embodiments of both tale-telling and stage magic and who move through various genres of narrative and forms of print culture. These examinations push at the limits of prevailing approaches to the fairy tale across media. They also demonstrate the degree to which perspectives on the fairy tale as children's entertainment often obscure the complex histories and ideological underpinnings of specific tales. Mapping the histories of tales requires a fundamental reconfiguration of our thinking about early folklore study and about "fairy tales": their bearing on questions of genre and ideology but also their signifying possibilities—past, present, and future. Readers interested in folklore, fairy-tale studies, children's literature, and performance studies will embrace this informative monograph.
Author: Jen Harvie
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719062131
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
This text examines some of the most important performance in Britain from the mid-1980s into the new millennium. It considers contemporary British theatre in relation to national and supranational identities, critical concepts like globalisation and diaspora, and contemporary contexts such as the election of New Labour.
