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These essays of Sarah Carpenter have been selected to reflect her career’s close focus on the relationship of performance and audience. They are drawn from the last 25 years of her writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not chronologically but rather to develop her central theme through a range of genres, including morality plays, the interlude, court entertainments, international political spectacle, and the public ‘performances’ of natural and maintained fools. As a scholar who also has experience of acting and of production, Carpenter is particularly sensitive to the implications of location for creating meaning and generating audience reaction. The essays are focused on a relatively short time-span of 120 years, from the late fifteenth to the turn of the seventeenth century, and thus nuance a period traditionally divided between the late medieval and the early-modern, and between Catholicism and Protestantism. Carpenter shows how the dynamics of theatrical engagement in which the roles of audience and performer are frequently mixed or even reversed offer a more creative route to understanding how the individual and society respond to change. (CS1090)
These essays of Sarah Carpenter have been selected to reflect her career's close focus on the relationship of performance and audience. They are drawn from the last 25 years of her writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not chronologically but rather to develop her central theme through a range of genres, including morality plays, the interlude, court entertainments, international political spectacle, and the public 'performances' of natural and maintained fools. As a scholar who also has experience of acting and of production, Carpenter is particularly sensitive to the implications of location for creating meaning and generating audience reaction. The essays are focused on a relatively short time-span of 120 years, from the late fifteenth to the turn of the seventeenth century, and thus nuance a period traditionally divided between the late medieval and the early-modern, and between Catholicism and Protestantism. Carpenter shows how the dynamics of theatrical engagement in which the roles of audience and performer are frequently mixed or even reversed offer a more creative route to understanding how the individual and society respond to change. (CS1090)
Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences? And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship, theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights’ professional and linguistic networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies. In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances of hall playhouses, court masques, women’s drama, country-house theatricals, and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.
Early modern audiences, readerships, and viewerships were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few variables) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, dramatic and musical performances, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which each of these were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which authors, poets, artists, preachers, theologians, playwrights, and performers took account of and encoded pluriform potential audiences, readers, and viewers in their works, and how these varied parties encountered and responded to these works. The contributors here investigate these complex interactions through a variety of critical and methodological lenses.
This transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary work will be of interest to students, theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.
Blackfriars: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood in Early Modern London is a cultural history of an urban enclave best known in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the incongruous juxtaposition of playing and godly preaching. As the former site of one of London's great religious houses, the post-Reformation Blackfriars was a Liberty free from mayoral control. The legal exemptions and privileges enjoyed by its residents helped attract an unusual mix of groups and activities. Zealous preachers and puritan parishioners mingled with playhouse workers and playgoers, as well as with the immigrant 'strangers' who settled here. The book focuses on local playhouse-church relations and asks how a theatrical culture was able to flourish in a parish dominated by committed puritans. Physically, the church of St Anne's and the playhouse were virtually next-door, but ideologically they seemed poles apart. Yet despite the occasional efforts of some residents to close the playhouse, godly religion and commercial playing managed to coexist. In explanation, the book examines the conflicting economic and ideological priorities of residents and the overriding desire to promote order and neighborliness. More provocatively, I argue that the Blackfriars pulpit and stage could be mutually reinforcing sites of performance. Preachers as well as playwrights exploited the Liberty's vexed relations with authority to air satirical and dissident views of the established church and state. By examining Blackfriars sermons and plays side-by-side, the book reveals a synergy between two institutions usually considered implacable enemies.
Sarah Dustagheer offers the first in-depth, comparative analysis of the performance conditions of the Globe and the Blackfriars Theatres.
This book is a study of four of Shakespeare's major tragedies - "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear" and "Macbeth". It looks at these plays in a variety of contexts - both in isolation and in relation to each other and to the cultural, ideological, social and political contexts which produced them.