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Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. Volume 41 features articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.
Renaissance Drama in Action is a fascinating exploration of Renaissance theatre practice and staging. Covering questions of contemporary playhouse design, verse and language, staging and rehearsal practices, and acting styles, Martin White relates the characteristics of Renaissance theatre to the issues involved in staging the plays today. This refreshingly accessible volume: * examines the history of the plays on the English stage from the seventeenth century to the present day * explores questions arising from reconstructions, with particular reference to the new Globe Theatre * includes interviews with, and draws on the work and experience of modern theatre practitioners including Harriet Walter, Matthew Warchus, Trevor Nunn, Stephen Jeffreys, Adrian Noble and Helen Mirren * includes discussions of familiar plays such as The Duchess of Malfi and 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, as well as many lesser known play-texts Renaissance Drama in Action offers undergraduates and A-level students an invaluable guide to the characteristics of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and its relationship to contemporary theatre and staging.
Renaissance Drama By Women is a unique volume of plays and documents. For the first time, it demonstrates the wide range of theatrical activity in which women were involved during the Renaissance period. It includes full-length plays, a translated fragment by Queen Elizabeth I, a masque, and a substantial number of historical documents. With full and up-to-date accompanying critical material, this collection of texts is an exciting and invaluable resource for use in both the classroom and research. Special features introduced by the editors include: * introductory material to each play * modernized spellings * extensive notes and annotations * biographical essays on each playwright * a complete bibliography Methodically and authoritatively edited by S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, Renaissance Drama by Women is a true breakthrough for the study of women's literature and performance.
Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.
A study of early responses to the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Renaissance dramatists.
The book considers the London theatrical culture which took shape in the 1570s and came to an end in 1642. Places emphasis on those plays that are readily available in modern editions and can sometimes to be seen in modern productions, including Shakespeare. Provides students with the historical, literary and theatrical contexts they need to make sense of Renaissance drama. Includes a series of short biographies of playwrights during this period. Features close analyses of more than 20 plays, each of which draws attention to what makes a particular play interesting and identifies relevant critical questions. Examines early modern drama in terms of its characteristic actions, such as cuckolding, flattering, swaggering, going mad, and rising from the dead.
This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.
The specter of Spain rarely figures in our discussions of the drama that is often regarded as the crowning achievement of the English literary Renaissance. Yet dramatists such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare are exactly contemporary with England's protracted conflict with the Spanish Empire, a traditional ally turned archetypical adversary. Were these playwrights really so mute with respect to their nation's Spanish troubles? Or have we failed—for reasons cultural and institutional—to hear the Hispanophobic crosstalk that permeated the drama no less than England's other public discourses? Imagining an early modern public sphere in which dramatists cross pens with proto-imperialists, Protestant polemicists, recusant apologists, and a Machiavellian network of propagandists that included high government officials as well as journeyman printers, Eric Griffin uncovers the rhetorical strategies through which the Hispanophobic perspectives that shaped the so-called Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty were written into English cultural memory. At the same time, he demonstrates that the English were as ready to invoke Spain in the spirit of envious emulation as to demonize the Spanish other as an ethnic agent of intolerance and oppression. Interrogating the Whiggish orientation that has continued to view the English Renaissance through a haze of Anglo-American triumphalism, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain recovers the voices of key Spanish participants and the "Hispanized" Catholic resistance, revealing how England and Spain continued to draw upon shared traditions and cultural resources, even during the moments of their most storied confrontation.
At first consideration, it would seem that Shakespeare and Monty Python have very little in common other than that they're both English. Shakespeare wrote during the reign of a politically puissant Elizabeth, while Python flourished under an Elizabeth figurehead. Shakespeare wrote for rowdy theatre whereas Python toiled at a remove, for television. Shakespeare is The Bard; Python is-well-not. Despite all of these differences, Shakespeare and Monty are in fact related; this work considers both the differences and similarities between the two. It discusses Shakespeare's status as England's National Poet and Python's similar elevation. It explores various aspects of theatricality (troupe configurations, casting and writing choices, allusions to classical literature) used by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Monty Python. It also covers the uses and abuses of history in Shakespeare and Python; humor, especially satire, in Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker and Python; and the concept of the "Other" in Shakespearean and Pythonesque creations.