Author: Alan R. Young
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This is the first book to trace the history & significance of the tournament in all its aspects in the Tudor & Jacobean periods. In its original medieval form, the tournament was a cross between sport & warfare, often an event involving two large opposing groups of knights who fought each other across a wide area of country. Loss of life or limb was common. These brutal events were a far cry from the carefully controlled & staged affairs that tournaments had become by Tudor times, a development that mirrors a profound change in role. As a vehicle for training in warfare, the Tudor & Jacobean tournament was largely anachronistic, but it played a crucial part in the political & cultural life of the country. These events were a major instrument of political propaganda, a public spectacle which the monarch could use in the profoundly serious business of displaying his or her magnificence. They were frequently staged & lavishly financed, with the provision of rich & costly trappings for participants & key spectators alike. Tournaments were also of considerable importance in keeping alive the ideals of chivalry, & all that these implied about service to king & country. Unlike later court entertainments, tournaments were spectacles at which even the meanest citizen could bask in the display of royal magnificence. Drawing on much original research, Professor Young fully explores all aspects of the tournament & its significance, including the construction of tiltyards, the tournament as theatre, & tournament literature, some of which was contributed by such great figures as Philip Sidney & Ben Jonson. But above all Young makes clear that the tournament was never mere entertainment, extravagant fantasy, or the archaic exercise of obsolete military skills. In fact, Tudor & Jacobean tournaments helped to keep alive values & ideals which perhaps contributed to the English Civil War, the American Civil War & even World War I.
Author: J. R. Mulryne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521599887
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
The rebuilding of the Globe theatre (1599-1613) on London's Bankside, a few yards from the site of the playhouse in which many of Shakespeare's plays were first performed, must rank as one of the most imaginative enterprises of recent decades. It has aroused intense interest among scholars and the general public worldwide. This book offers a fully illustrated account of the research that has gone into the Globe reconstruction, drawing on the work of leading scholars, theatre people and craftsmen to provide an authoritative view of the twenty years of research and the hundreds of practical decisions entailed. Documents of the period are explored afresh; the techniques of timber-framed building and the decorative practices of Elizabethan craftsmen explained; and all of this reconciled with the requirements of the actors and restrictions of modern architectural design. The result is a book that will fascinate scholarly readers and laymen alike.
Author: Alan V. Murray
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783275421
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Fresh insights into the development of the tournament as an opportunity for social display.
Author: Braden Frieder
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1935503324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Chivalry and the Perfect Prince is a survey of the ceremonial armor crafted for the Spanish Habsburg monarchs of the sixteenth century. It examines notable tournaments and pageantry held at the courts of Charles V and Philip II, and the artworks associated with them. Braden Frieder guides the reader through these tournaments, jousting, and other knightly exercises as part of a larger aristocratic culture that included arms and armor, paintings, tapestries, medals, and sculptures with chivalric themes. Frieder presents Habsburg tournaments in their proper historical context as an extension of imperial politics, drawing comparisons with popular chivalric literature of the period. Frieder’s study utilizes extensive primary source material and contemporary documents, many appearing for the first time in English. Included in this book are eighty-one illustrations of fine art and armor from the sixteenth century, the crescendo of the armorer's art in Europe. For the first time in print, these artworks are treated collectively, as integral parts of aristocratic life and culture during the Renaissance.
Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300206917
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Shakespeare’s plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth. Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity’s rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth’s reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule.
Author: David Bevington
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521594363
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
A 1998 collection which takes an alternative look at the courtly masque in early seventeenth-century England.
Author: Jennifer Robin Goodman
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780851157009
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
The literature of medieval knighthood is shown to have influenced exploration narratives from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith. Explorers from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith viewed their travels and discoveries in the light of attitudes they absorbed from the literature of medieval knighthood. Their own accounts, and contemporary narratives [reinforced by the interest of early printers], reveal this interplay, but historians of exploration on the one hand, and of chivalry on the other, have largely ignored this cultural connection. Jennifer Goodman convincingly develops the ideaof the chivalric romance as an imaginative literature of travel; she traces the publication of medieval chivalric texts alongside exploration narratives throughout the later middle ages and renaissance, and reveals parallel themesand preoccupations. She illustrates this with the histories of a sequence of explorers and their links with chivalry, from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith, and including Gadifer de la Salle and his expedition to the Canary Islands, Prince Henry the Navigator, Cortés, Hakluyt, and Sir Walter Raleigh. JENNIFER GOODMAN teaches at Texas A & M University.
Author: Roy Strong
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244290
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Fifty years after his seminal Tate gallery London exhibition, 'The Elizabethan Image', leading authority Roy Strong returns with fresh eyes to the subject closest to his heart, The Virgin Queen, her court and our first Elizabethan age From celebrated portraits of the Queen and paintings of knights and courtiers, to works depicting an aspiring 'middle class', Strong presents a detailed and authoritative examination of one of the most fascinating periods of British art. Enriching previous perceptions and ways of seeing the Elizabethans in their world, he reveals an age parallel in many ways to our own--a country aspiring professionally and changing socially. The gaze is from the inside, capturing the knights, melancholy lovers, poets (including Sidney, Donne and Sir John Davies), court favourites and their 'Gloriana'--as they mirrored and made themselves. Beginning with the great portrait of the Queen in grand procession with her Garter Knights, Strong pinpoints the characters and key motifs that run through the rest of the book: chivalry, changes to the social order, emblems and imagery - the full richness of the Elizabethan imagination. These pictures were intimate--personal commissions by private individuals, and not necessarily for public view. As such they are a glimpse into private worlds and sentiments and speak eloquently for the people who paid for, painted and lived amongst them, reversing an academic tendency to treat the portraits as if they had a life of their own, not grounded by the real people who commissioned them. Roy Strong concludes this richly illustrated volume with the famous and complex Rainbow Portrait, unpicking the iconography of this final painting of an ageless Elizabeth in her 'Mask of Youth'. Within a year of its completion the queen was dead--her portraits increasingly demoted and replaced by Mary Stuart's--as the splendour of the Elizabethan age and 'the cult of the queen' made way for new monarch James VI, who was to rule over a united England and Scotland.
Author: Sue Simpson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317054725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
A favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Henry Lee was known as ’the most accomplished cavaliero’ in England. This handsome, entertaining and highly convivial gentleman was an important participant in life at court as Elizabeth’s tournament champion. He created the spectacular Accession Day tournaments held annually before London crowds of more than 8,000 people, was Lieutenant of Elizabeth’s palace at Woodstock, and Master of the Armoury at the Tower of London during the Spanish Armada. This is the only biography of Sir Henry Lee in print, and explores the interaction of politics, culture and society of the Elizabethan court through the eyes of a popular and long-serving courtier. Indeed, few other courtiers managed to live such a long and satisfying life, and although this study of Sir Henry’s life shows a diverse nature typical of many Elizabethan gentlemen - his travels to the courts of Italy, his knowledge of arms and armour, his delight in the world of emblems and symbolism, his close association with Philip Sidney, and his intimate relationship with a notorious woman at least thirty years his junior - it also questions what it meant to be a courtier. Was the game actually worth the candle?
Author: James Shapiro
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416541659
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
"Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year--King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age forty-two, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn--King Lear--then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. It was a memorable year in England as well--and a grim one, in the aftermath of a terrorist plot conceived by a small group of Catholic gentry that had been uncovered at the last hour. The foiled Gunpowder Plot would have blown up the king and royal family along with the nation's political and religious leadership. The aborted plot renewed anti-Catholic sentiment and laid bare divisions in the kingdom. It was against this background that Shakespeare finished Lear, a play about a divided kingdom, then wrote a tragedy that turned on the murder of a Scottish king, Macbeth. He ended this astonishing year with a third masterpiece no less steeped in current events and concerns: Antony and Cleopatra. The Year of Lear sheds light on these three great tragedies by placing them in the context of their times, while also allowing us greater insight into how Shakespeare was personally touched by such events as a terrible outbreak of plague and growing religious divisions. For anyone interested in Shakespeare, this is an indispensable book"--
