The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy

The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy PDF Author: Muriel Clara Bradbrook
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description

The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy

The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy PDF Author: Muriel Clara Bradbrook
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy

The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy PDF Author: M.C. Bradbrook
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520345983
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.

The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy

The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy PDF Author: Larry S. Champion
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674271418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The evolution of Shakespeare's comedy, in Larry Champion's view, is apparent in the expansion of his comic vision to include a complete reflection of human life while maintaining a comic detachment for the audience. Like the other popular dramatists of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare used the diverse comic motifs and devices which time and custom had proved effective. He went further, however, and created progressively deeper levels of characterization and plot interaction, thereby forming characters who were not merely devices subordinated to the needs of the plot. Shakespeare's development as a comic playwright, suggests Champion, was "consistently in the direction of complexity or depth of characterization." His earliest works, like those of his contemporaries, are essentially situation comedies: the humor arises from action rather than character. There is no significant development of the main characters; instead, they are manipulated into situations which are humorous as a result, for example, of mistaken identity or slapstick confusion. The ensuing phase of Shakespeare's comedy sets forth plots in which the emphasis is on identity rather than physical action, a revelation of character which occurs in one of two forms: either a hypocrite is exposed for what he actually is or a character who has assumed an unnatural or abnormal pose is forced to realize and admit the ridiculousness of his position. In the final comedies involving sin and sacrificial forgiveness, however, character development is concerned with a "transformation of values." Although each of the comedies is discussed, Champion concentrates on nine, dividing them according to the complexity of characterization. He pursues as well the playwright's efforts to achieve for the spectator the detached stance so vital to comedy. Shakespeare obtained this perspective, Champion observes, through experimentation with the use of material mirroring the main action--mockery, parody, or caricature--and through the use of a "comic pointer" who is himself involved in the action but is sufficiently independent of the other characters to provide the audience with an omniscient view.

A History of Elizabethan Drama

A History of Elizabethan Drama PDF Author: Muriel Clara Bradbrook
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521295260
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Shakespearian Comedy

Shakespearian Comedy PDF Author: H. B. Charlton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136556214
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
First published in 1938. This is a survey of Shakepeare's comedies which illustrates the playwright's increasing grasp on the art and idea of comedy. Themes, characters and plays covered include: Romanticism in Shakespearian comedy; Shakespeare's Jew, Falstaff, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Dark Comedies.

Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy

Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy PDF Author: M. C. Bradbrook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521296953
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The first edition of this book formed the basis of the modern approach to Elizabethan poetic drama as a performing art, an approach pursued in subsequent volumes by Professor Bradbrook. Its influence has also extended to other fields; it has been studied by Grigori Kozintesev and Sergei Eisenstein for instance. Conventions of open stage, stylized plot and characters, and actors' traditions of presentation are related to the special expectations which a rhetorical training produced in the listeners. The general discussion of tragic conventions is followed by individual studies of how these were used by Marlowe, Tourneur, Webster and Middlewon. For this second edition Professor Bradbrook has revised her material and written a new introduction. A new final chapter on performace and characterization describes the conventions of role-playing. Dramatists before and after Shakespeare are compared with him in their methods of showing a complex identity on stage. This chapter also considers the work of Marston, Chapman and Ford in relation to the themes and conventions studied in earlier chapters, providing a link with the subsequent volumes in A History of Elizabethan Drama.

Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy

Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy PDF Author: Joseph Allen Bryant
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813130958
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse. Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early a.

A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies

A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies PDF Author: Michael Mangan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317895037
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

Elizabethan Grotesque (Routledge Revivals)

Elizabethan Grotesque (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Neil Rhodes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317620410
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The comic grotesque is a powerful element in a great deal of Elizabethan literature, but one which has attracted scant critical attention. In this study, first published in 1980, Neil Rhodes examines the nature of the grotesque in late sixteenth-century culture, and shows the part it played in the development of new styles of comic prose and drama in Elizabethan England. In defining ‘grotesque’, the author considers the stylistic techniques of Rabelais and Aretino, as well as the graphic arts. He discusses the use of the grotesque in Elizabethan pamphlet literature and the early satirical journalists such as Nashe, and argues that their work in turn stimulated the growth of satirical drama at the end of the century. The second part of the book explains the importance of Nashe’s achievement for Shakespeare and Jonson, concluding that the linguistic resources of English Renaissance comedy are peculiarly – and perhaps uniquely – physical.