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As well as 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were known as 'play-patchers' because their texts were made from separate documents. This book is the first to consider all the papers created by authors and theatres by the time of the opening performance, recovering types of script not previously known to have existed. With chapters on plot-scenarios, arguments, playbills, prologues and epilogues, songs, staged scrolls, backstage-plots and parts, it shows how textually distinct production was from any single unified book. And, as performance documents were easily lost, relegated or reused, the story of a play's patchy creation also becomes the story of its co-authorship, cuts, revisions and additions. Using a large body of fresh evidence, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England brings a wholly new reading to printed and manuscript playbooks of the Shakespearean period, redefining what a play, and what a playwright, actually is.
Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)—intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these experiments into a uniquely dramatic typography that was constantly responsive to performance effects made it possible for 'plays' to be marketed, collected, and read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a print genre distinct from all other genres of imaginative writing. It has been said, 'If a play is a book, it is not a play.' Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England shows that 'play' and 'book' were, in fact, mutually constitutive: it was the very bookishness of plays printed in early modern England that allowed them to be recognized by their earliest readers as plays in the first place.
The essays in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England explore maternity's textual and cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences from 1540-1690. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production of gender identity in the period.
Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality--from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)--intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these experiments into a uniquely dramatic typography that was constantly responsive to performance effects made it possible for 'plays' to be marketed, collected, and read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a print genre distinct from all other genres of imaginative writing. It has been said, 'If a play is a book, it is not a play.' Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England shows that 'play' and 'book' were, in fact, mutually constitutive: it was the very bookishness of plays printed in early modern England that allowed them to be recognized by their earliest readers as plays in the first place.
The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history.
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Rethinking Theatrical Documents brings together fifteen major scholars to analyse and theorise the documents, lost and found, that produced a play in Shakespeare's England. Showing how the playhouse frantically generated paratexts, it explores a rich variety of entangled documents, some known and some unknown: from before the play (drafts, casting lists, actors' parts); during the play (prologues, epilogues, title-boards); and after the play (playbooks, commonplace snippets, ballads) – though 'before', 'during' and 'after' intertwine in fascinating ways. By using collective intervention to rethink both theatre history and book history, it provides new ways of understanding plays critically, interpretatively, editorially, practically and textually.
"How were books in early modern England made, circulated, sold, stored, read, marked, altered, preserved, and destroyed? The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England provides a stimulating account of the very newest work in the field, and an exploration of how new thinking might develop. Written by scholars working at the cutting-edge of the subject, from the UK and North America, the volume combines lucidity, scholarly expertise, intellectual precision, and an imaginative structure that will enable contributors to show why the history of the book matters. This volume analyses in a lively manner the nature and role of the book in early modern England, and also considers critically how we can talk about the history of book"--
A thorough sourcebook and accessible student text covering the interplay between religion, politics, society and popular culture in the Tudor and Stuart periods. `An excellent and imaginative collection.' - Diarmaid MacCulloch
This book is the first comprehensive examination of commercial drama as a reading genre in early modern England. Taking as its focus pre-Restoration printed drama’s most common format, the single-play quarto playbook, it interrogates what the form and content of these playbooks can tell us about who their earliest readers were, why they might have wanted to read contemporary commercial drama, and how they responded to the printed versions of plays that had initially been performed in the playhouses of early modern London. Focusing on professional plays printed in quarto between 1584 and 1660, the book juxtaposes the implications of material and paratextual evidence with analysis of historical traces of playreading in extant playbooks and manuscript commonplace books. In doing so, it presents more detailed and nuanced conclusions than have previously been enabled by studies focused on works by one author or on a single type of evidence.
This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal–historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine.