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This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.
Introducing the reader to important topics in English Renaissance tragedy, this Companion presents fresh readings of key texts.
This book uses theories of memory derived from cognitive science to offer new ways of understanding how literary works remember other literary works. Using terms derived from psychology - implicit and explicit memory, interference and forgetting - Raphael Lyne shows how works by Renaissance writers such as Wyatt, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton interact with their sources. The poems and plays in question are themselves sources of insight into the workings of memory, sharing and anticipating some scientific categories in the process of their thinking. Lyne proposes a way forward for cognitive approaches to literature, in which both experiments and texts are valued as contributors to interdisciplinary questions. His book will interest researchers and upper-level students of renaissance literature and drama, Shakespeare studies, memory studies, and classical reception.
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Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers’ sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama’s nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage. Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama. Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies.
The first study of legal reform and literature in early modern EnglandThis book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. The late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean surge in the policies and enforcement of the reformation of manners has been well-documented. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the degree to which the law itself was the focus of reform for legislators, the judiciary, preachers, and writers alike. While the majority of law and literature studies characterize the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law's own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. In readings of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the Gesta Grayorum, Donne's 'Satyre V', and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Strain argues that the terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike imagined and evaluated form and character. Key FeaturesReevaluates canonical writers in light of developments in legal historical research, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to works Collects an extensive variety of legal, political, and literary sources to reconstruct the discourse on early modern legal reform, providing an introduction to a topic that is currently underrepresented in early modern legal cultural studiesAnalyses the laws own vulnerability to individual agency.
Offering new and theatrically informed readings of plays by a broad range of Renaissance dramatists - including Marlowe, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Middleton and Ford - this new book addresses the question of pleasure: both erotic pleasure as represented on stage and aesthetic pleasure as experienced by readers and spectators. Some of the issues raised (the distribution of pleasure by gender, the notion of consent) intersect with feminist reinterpretations of Renaissance culture.
The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At precisely the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more 'probable'. The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatis personae habitually gather evidence and 'invent' arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, thus prompting us, as readers and audience, to reconstruct this 'evidence' as stories of characters' private histories and inner lives. In this drama, people act in uncertainty, inferring one another's motives and testing evidence for their conclusions. As well as offering an overarching account of how changes in juridical epistemology relate to post-Reformation drama, this book examines comic dramatic writing associated with the Inns of Court in the overlooked decades of the 1560s and 70s. It argues that these experiments constituted an influential sub-genre, assimilating the structures of Roman comedy to current civic and political concerns with the administration of justice. This sub-genre's impact may be seen in Shakespeare's early experiments in revenge tragedy, history play and romance comedy, in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, as well as Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, Bartholomew Fair and The Alchemist. The book ranges from mid-fifteenth century drama, through sixteenth century interludes to the drama of the 1590s and 1600s. It draws on recent research by legal historians, and on a range of legal-historical sources in print and manuscript.
None of these assumptions has been tested against the evidence of the surviving plays from the period - an oversight that the present study seeks to remedy.