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A study of British theatre historiography, from its origins in the Restoration to its development as an academic discipline in the twentieth century.
During the reign of Queen Victoria, herself an ardent theatregoer as well as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a remarkable rapprochement was effected between the Church and the stage. This 1997 book explores the implications for the theatre of the great religious movements of the period: Tractarianism, Christian Socialism and Latitudinarianism. This central relationship is seen in the context of other important themes in Victorian cultural history such as censorship, urbanization, transport, leisure, self-improvement and women's emancipation. The volume contains portraits of significant churchmen, dramatists, actors and actresses, including Newman and Keble, Bulwer Lytton and Shaw, Irving, Fanny Kemble and Ellen Terry. They were amongst the influential figures who participated in the search for a common culture which preoccupied the nineteenth century. To the Victorians the Church and the theatre were important parts of everyday life; in this study the two institutions are explored in relation not only to each other but also to the social, economic and intellectual movements of the period.
At a time when medieval studies is increasingly concerned with historicizing and theorizing its own origins and history, the development of the study of Middle English has been relatively neglected. The Invention of Middle English collects for the first time the principal sources through which this history can be traced. The documents presented here highlight the uncertain and haphazard way in which ideas about Middle English language and literature were shaped by antiquarians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a valuable sourcebook for medieval studies, for study of the reception of the Middle Ages, and, more generally, for the history of the rise of English. The anthology is divided into two sections. The first section traces the development of ideas about the Middle English language in the work of thirteen writers, including George Hickes, Thomas Warton, Jacob Grimm, Henry Sweet, and James Murray. The second section represents literary criticism and commentary by nineteen authors, including Warton, Thomas Percy, Joseph Ritson, Walter Scott, Thomas Wright, and Walter Skeat. Each of the extracts is annotated and introduced with a note presenting historical, biographical, and bibliographical information along with a guide to further reading. A general introduction provides an overview of the state of Middle English study and a brief history of the formation of the discipline.
In Shakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare’s connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city’s cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects—as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors—to the Shakespearean stage.As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare’s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare’s stage—including the ass’s head of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth—were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.