Download Free Drama Performance And Polity In Pre Cromwellian Ireland Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Drama Performance And Polity In Pre Cromwellian Ireland and write the review.

A study of the early history of drama and performance in Ireland, from the 7th century through the 16th and 17th centuries, ending on the eve of the arrival of Oliver Cromwell.
The Irish contribution to world theatre is famous, but today awareness of Irish theatrical activity is chiefly confined to the modern period. This book corrects that imbalance with an unparalleled study of the early history of drama and performance in Ireland, from the seventh century through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and ending on the eve of the arrival of Oliver Cromwell. The work of professional entertainers is discussed, as is that of amateurs, in theatricals sponsored by churches, guilds, civic authorities, and aristocratic patrons. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, many unpublished, Alan Fletcher opens up a vibrant but forgotten Irish landscape in which drama and performance collaborated actively in the mapping and manufacture of social history. Modern Irish drama is acknowledged as having a rich and vibrant tradition. Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland helps to show how that vibrant tradition of drama and theatre has a very long history. Dr. Fletcher deals not only with performance traditions outside the Pale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but for the first time delves into such traditions as can be gleaned about Gaelic Ireland during the preceding millennium. Fletcher surveys the 'native' traditions beyond the Pale; early and sixteenth-century activities within Dublin; Kilkenny drama; provincial centres outside Dublin; and Dublin in the seventeenth century up to the arrival of Oliver Cromwell, when the Irish theatres were closed.
John Derricke’s Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne is a key work of English print-making, Irish and English history and cultural misunderstanding. The work attests to the complexity of English and Irish relations, colonisation, military history, imperial propaganda, poetry, art, printing and the forging of identity in the early modern British Isles. The original work comprises of a lengthy poetic narrative and twelve famous woodcuts of the highest quality produced in sixteenth-century England. They also represent some of the only contemporary views of early modern Ireland on record. The sixteen interdisciplinary essays in this collection focus on the text’s political and historical meaning, print history, iconographic elements, paratexts, literary and artistic influences, and cultural archaeology. The collection will appeal to scholars of many disciplines.
Treating the Public is a comparative history of commercial theater, charitable organizations of welfare and public health, and public opinion in important cities in the Spanish and Anglo Atlantic Worlds during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines theater as a cultural, political, and social phenomenon, especially in Spain and its empire. This unique study highlights public drama’s rapid expansion into urban daily life in the Spanish Atlantic, where men and women provided and sought entertainment while engaging in Catholic piety and poor relief.
This book discusses Irish Passion plays (plays that rewrite or parody the story of the Passion of Christ) in modern Irish drama from the Irish Literary Revival to the present day. It offers innovative readings of such canonical plays as J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, W. B. Yeats’s Calvary, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire, as well as of less well-known plays by Padraic Pearse, Lady Gregory, G. B. Shaw, Seán O’Casey, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett and David Lloyd. Challenging revisionist readings of the rhetoric of “blood sacrifice” and martyrdom in the Irish Republican tradition, it argues that the Passion play is a powerful political genre which centres on the staged death of the (usually male) protagonist, and makes visible the usually invisible violence perpetrated both by colonial power and by the postcolonial state in the name of modernity.
The nature, conditions and place of medieval theatre performance remain somewhat mysterious, with scholarship in the field tending to be devoted to its context, and to the texts themselves. The essays in this volume seek to address this omission. They consider such matters as the nature of performance in theatre/dance/puppetry/automata; the performed qualities of such events; the conventions of performed work; what took place in the act of performing; and the relationships between performers and witnesses, and what conditioned these relationships.
This book redefines the plays and theatrical culture of the years 1625 to 1642 as something more than simply post-Shakespearean in character. Scholars reveal the drama's mixture of political engagement, urbane cosmopolitanism, and commercial ingenuity. They urge us to recalibrate our histories to account for the innovations of the Caroline period.
Seamus Heaney once described the 'sense of place' generated by the early Abbey theatre as the 'imaginative protein' of later Irish writing. Drawing on theorists of space such as Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, Mapping Irish Theatre argues that theatre is 'a machine for making place from space'. Concentrating on Irish theatre, the book investigates how this Irish 'sense of place' was both produced by, and produced, the remarkable work of the Irish Revival, before considering what happens when this spatial formation begins to fade. Exploring more recent site-specific and place-specific theatre alongside canonical works of Irish theatre by playwrights including J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel, the study proposes an original theory of theatrical space and theatrical identification, whose application extends beyond Irish theatre, and will be useful for all theatre scholars.
In Ireland, few figures have generated more hatred than Oliver Cromwell, whose seventeenth-century conquest, massacres, and dispossessions would endure in the social memory for ages to come. The Devil from over the Sea explores the many ways in which Cromwell was remembered and sometimes conveniently 'forgotten' in historical, religious, political, and literary texts, according to the interests of different communities across time. Cromwell's powerful afterlife in Ireland, however, cannot be understood without also investigating his presence in folklore and the landscape, in ruins and curses. Nor can he be separated from the idea of the 'Cromwellian': a term which came to elicit an entire chain of contemptuous associations that would begin after his invasion and assume a wholly new force in the nineteenth century. What emerges from all these memorializing traces is a multitudinous Cromwell who could be represented as brutal, comic, sympathetic, or satanic. He could be discarded also, tellingly, from the accounts of the past, and especially by those which viewed him as an embarrassment or worse. In addition to exploring the many reasons why Cromwell was so vehemently remembered or forgotten in Ireland, Sarah Covington finally uncovers the larger truths conveyed by sometimes fanciful or invented accounts. Contrary to being damaging examples of myth-making, the memorializations contained in martyrologies, folk tales, or newspaper polemics were often productive in cohering communities, or in displaying agency in the form of 'counter-memories' that claimed Cromwell for their own and reshaped Irish history in the process.
This book looks at modes of performance and forms of theatre in Nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. On subjects as varied as the vogue for fairy plays to the representation of economics to the work of a parliamentary committee in regulating theatres, the authors redefine what theatre and performance in the Nineteenth century might be.