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Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, exploring both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order discuss a wide variety of possible sources for historical drama, ranging from oral traditions to chronicles. They also explore genres outside the canon which think of 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities and closet drama.
This extremely readable volume analyses many individual texts, often in detail and for the first time, and also places them within the whole range of contemporary theatrical output, with its diversity of outlook and constant shifts in fashion and subject.
This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.
What were the causes of Restoration drama's licentiousness? How did the elegantly-turned comedy of Congreve become the pointed satire of Fielding? And how did Sheridan and Goldsmith reshape the materials they inherited? In the first account of the entire period for more than a decade, Richard Bevis argues that none of these questions can be answered without an understanding of Augustan and Georgian history. The years between 1660 and 1789 saw considerable political and social upheaval, which is reflected in the eclectic array of dramatic forms that is Georgian theatre's essential characteristic.
A Play Without a Stage: English Renaissance Drama, 1642 to 1660, focuses on the production of early modern drama during the English Civil War and Interregnum, when commercial playing was outlawed. Despite the prominence of book history as a methodology over the last three decades, the era of the theatre ban - when performance declined but dramatic publication flourished - remains understudied. It is in this era, I argue, that the genre, indeed even the critical field, of early modern drama as we know it was created. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English Renaissance stage - the theatres were closed, demolished, converted into tenements, and once famous actors and playwrights, now unemployed, died in poverty - the professional drama of 1576-1642 not only lived on, but thrived, in print. In the absence of contemporary performances, stationers presented pre-war plays as relics of an absent, idealized theatrical culture. The theatre ban prematurely aged the genre of English drama, but at the same time, sta- tioners began publishing previously unprinted Tudor and Stuart plays. These plays, at once new and old, were marketed in terms of novelty and finitude: they represented the latest offerings of a tradition that had drawn to a close. The era's playbook publishers capitalized on theatrical nostalgia, but also looked ahead to the moment when the store of previously unprinted professional drama would run out. At that point, stationers turned to the project of anatomizing the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first dramatic anthologies and comprehensive dramatic catalogues in the 1650s. With chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia and anthologies, the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period and the critical conceptions of the theatre ban since the Restoration, A Play Without a Stage argues that the death of contemporary English theatre gave birth to English Renaissance drama. The seeds of this field - that is, of the modern canon, the editorial and performance traditions, and Shakespeare's supremacy in all - were planted not in the eighteenth century, but in the mid-seventeenth century.