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The twelve essays in Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage analyse the influences that shaped the fictional constructs that inhabited the drama of the early modern period. The contributors, all specialists in the field working in France and England, offer a wide spectrum of views and discuss a variety of dramatic texts ranging from late medieval cycle plays and interludes of the Tudor period, to plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Tourneur and Jonson. The early modern stage self emerges out of this collection as the site of a rich confluence of discursive and historical forces existing beyond the theatre itself. Three essays in the first section reveal how abstract figures like Mundus and Mankind gradually became endowed with personal motives and personalizing traits which brought into existence stage beings with a capacity for emotion. In the second section, three essays deal with specific cultural factors that influenced the representation of selfhood in John Lyly’s Alexander, in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and in a selection of Stuart court masques presented at Whitehall. The third section offers new insights into the composition of Hamlet as a dramatized personality; the fourth investigates the way in which the poet-playwright’s autobiographical impulses may have helped in the construction of early modern stage selves; the final, fifth section explores the kaleidoscopic sources of the royal protagonists in Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me, and Shakespeare’s Richard III. This collection of essays seeks to add a further contribution to the growing body of criticism that investigates the multi-facetted, multi-layered construction of early modern subjectivity.
This book considers the relationship between the vogue for putting the Ottoman Empire on the English stage and the repertory system that underpinned London playmaking. The sheer visibility of 'the Turk' in plays staged between 1567 and 1642 has tended to be interpreted as registering English attitudes to Islam, as articulating popular perceptions of Anglo-Ottoman relations, and as part of a broader interest in the wider world brought home by travellers, writers, adventurers, merchants, and diplomats. Such reports furnished playwrights with raw material which, fashioned into drama, established ‘the Turk’ as a fixture in the playhouse. But it was the demand for plays to replenish company repertories to attract London audiences that underpinned playmaking in this period. Thus this remarkable fascination for the Ottoman Empire is best understood as a product of theatre economics and the repertory system, rather than taken directly as a measure of cultural and historical engagement.
Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.
Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays, and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study Peter Hyland considers a range of practical issues related to the performance of disguise. He goes on to examine various conceptual issues that provide a background to theatrical disguise (the relation of self and "other", the meaning of mask and performance). He looks at many disguise plays under three broad headings. He considers moral issues (the almost universal association of disguise with "evil"); social issues (sumptuary legislation, clothing, and the theatre, and constructions of class, gender and national or racial identity); and aesthetic issues (disguise as an emblem of theatre, and the significance of disguise for the dramatic artist). The study serves to examine the significant ways in which disguise devices have been used in early modern drama in England.
By examining these competing depictions of combat that coexist in sixteenth-century texts ranging from Arthurian romance to early modern medical texts, this study reveals both the importance of combat in understanding the humanist subject and the contours of the previously neglected pre-modern subject.
This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.
This book provides insights into the maze of ‘know thyself’ through a carefully detailed, comparative study of the Sartrean no-self and the Deleuzean rhizomic self. It is informative, argumentative and rich in literary context, and mainly focuses on the shift in the notion of self from Sartre’s elegiac, suicidal and nihilistic tone seen pervasively in modernist fiction to the celebratory, Deleuzean self in postmodernist fiction. To trace this shift, the book presents a comparative analysis of selected novels, showing that authors like Bellow and Atwood have adopted a more positive attitude toward the self similar to the Deleuzean rhizomic self, while authors like Hedayat and Beckett have more reductionist, decadent, nihilistic views on the self, like the Sartrean no-self. Moreover, as argued in the cases of the protagonists in the selected novels, this book further asserts that the Deleuzean rhizomic self might be seen as a possible alternative to help one survive in times of crisis, in contrast to the nihilistic Sartrean no-self.
Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation: The Skull Beneath the Skin is a unique exploration of why early modern noblewomen starved themselves, how they understood their behaviour, and how it was interpreted and received by their contemporaries. The first study of its kind, the book adopts an interdisciplinary and highly detailed approach to examining women's self-starvation between 1500 and 1640. It is also the first book to focus on this behaviour among noblewomen. Beginning with a contextual outline of gender, food and embodiment in early modern culture, the book then looks explicitly at the food behaviour of several well-known figures, including Elizabeth I, Catherine of Aragon, Mary I, Arbella Stuart, and Katherine Grey. Each case study engages with a variety of primary sources, such as letters and legal documents, as well as with literary texts, providing an in-depth exploration of the relationship between self-starvation and concepts of autonomy, sexuality, and literal and symbolic imprisonment, highlighting the body and specifically the act of eating as fundamental to identity in the early modern period and today. Employing both literary and historical methodologies, Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation is an important contribution to the study of the history of the body and is essential reading for students and academics of early modern women's history, gender history, food history, and the history of the body.
Amid the religious tumult of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English scholars, preachers, and dramatists examined, debated, and refashioned tales concerning Pope Joan, a ninth-century woman who, as legend has it, cross-dressed her way to the papacy only to have her imposture exposed when she gave birth during a solemn procession. The legend concerning a popess had first taken written form in the thirteenth century and for several hundred years was more or less accepted. The Reformation, however, polarized discussions of the legend, pitting Catholics, who denied the story’s veracity, against Protestants, who suspected a cover-up and instantly cited Joan as evidence of papal depravity. In this heated environment, writers reimagined Joan variously as a sorceress, a hermaphrodite, and even a noteworthy author. The Afterlife of Pope Joan examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates concerning the popess’s existence, uncovering the disputants’ historiographic methods, rules of evidence, rhetorical devices, and assumptions concerning what is probable and possible for women and transvestites. Author Craig Rustici then investigates the cultural significance of a series of notions advanced in those debates: the claim that Queen Elizabeth I was a popess in her own right, the charge that Joan penned a book of sorcery, and the curious hypothesis that the popess was not a disguised woman at all but rather a man who experienced a sort of spontaneous sex change. The Afterlife of Pope Joan draws upon the discourses of religion, politics, natural philosophy, and imaginative literature, demonstrating how the popess functioned as a powerful rhetorical instrument and revealing anxieties and ambivalences about gender roles that persist even today. Craig M. Rustici is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University.
Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2001.