Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres

Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres PDF

Author: Anthony W. Johnson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-10-14

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1317163303

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Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences? And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship, theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights’ professional and linguistic networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies. In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances of hall playhouses, court masques, women’s drama, country-house theatricals, and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.

Renaissance Man

Renaissance Man PDF

Author: Tommi Alho

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-11-15

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 9027262004

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Here friends of Anthony W. Johnson honour him as a re-embodiment of the polymathic artist-scholar figure once observable in Ben Jonson, on whom he has done some of his most distinctive work. Part I of the book reflects his strong grounding in English literature and culture of the seventeenth century, with essays, not only on Ben Jonson, but also on university drama, on grammar school drama, and on humanist literary taste. Part II responds to his pioneering flights of culture-imagological time-travel to other periods, with essays on riddles through the ages, on Matthew Arnold’s doubts about Homeric pictorialism, and on anciently comic elements in George Gissing’s urban fiction. Part III celebrates his importance, both as scholar and artist, for the present day, with essays extending imagological analysis to the singer Nick Drake, to the avant-garde Danish poet Morten Søkilde, and to Sean S. Baker’s film Tangerine, plus a climactic celebration of Johnson’s own performances on solo violin and guitar as augmented by self-recording.

Literary Communication as Dialogue

Literary Communication as Dialogue PDF

Author: Roger D. Sell

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2020-11-15

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 9027260575

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As traced by Roger D. Sell, literary communication is a process of community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to them respect each other’s human autonomy, literature flourishes as an enjoyable, though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with historical differences. These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more recently to postmodernity’s well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem rather dated. Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell’s ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and Rushdie.

New Directions in Early Modern English Drama

New Directions in Early Modern English Drama PDF

Author: Aidan Norrie

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-07-06

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1501514024

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This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Recent scholarship has begun to think more critically about the edge, particularly in relation to the canon and canonicity. This book demonstrates that the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theaters, and audiences. The book engages with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality to acknowledge and extend the rich sense of playmaking and all its ancillary activities that have emerged over the last decade. The essays by a global team of scholars bring to life people and practices that flourished on the edge, manifesting their importance to both early modern audiences, and to current readers and performers.

Mastering the Revels

Mastering the Revels PDF

Author: Richard Dutton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-07-14

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 0198819455

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Mastering the Revels traces the measures taken by the governments of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I to regulate the new phenomenon of fixed playhouses and resident playing companies in London, and to censor their plays. It focuses on the Masters of the Revels, whose primary function wasto seek out theatrical entertainment for the court but whose role expanded to include oversight of the players and their playhouses.The book proceeds chronologically, tracking each of the Masters in the period--Edmund Tilney (served 1579-1610), Sir George Buc (1610-22), Sir John Astley (1622-3), and Sir Henry Herbert (1623-1642). Tilney was the first to receive a Special Commission giving him wide-ranging powers over theplayers. When Buc first became involved is examined here in detail, as is the parallel history of the Children of the Queen's Revels who between 1604 and 1608 staged some of the most scandalous plays of the era. Astley succeeded Buc, but soon sold the office to Herbert, who then served to theclosing of the theatres.Manuscripts of plays censored by Tilney, Buc, and Herbert have survived and are examined in detail to assess their concerns. Large parts of Herbert's office-book have also survived, giving detailed insights into his professional life, including interactions with both the court and the players. Itreveals the difficulties he faced negotiating recurrent popular pressure for war against Spain, resistance to Archbishop Laud's reforms of the church, and Henrietta Maria's problematic presence as a Catholic queen to Charles I.

John Fletcher's Rome

John Fletcher's Rome PDF

Author: Domenico Lovascio

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2022-03-22

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1526157373

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John Fletcher’s Rome is the first book to explore John Fletcher’s engagement with classical antiquity. Like Shakespeare and Jonson, Fletcher wrote, alone or in collaboration, a number of Roman plays: Bonduca, Valentinian, The False One and The Prophetess. Unlike Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s, however, Fletcher’s Roman plays have seldom been the subject of critical discussion. Domenico Lovascio’s ground-breaking study examines these plays as a group for the first time, thus identifying disorientation as the unifying principle of Fletcher’s portrayal of imperial Rome. John Fletcher’s Rome argues that Fletcher’s dramatization of ancient Rome exudes a sense of detachment and scepticism as to the authority of Roman models resulting from his irreverent approach to the classics. The book sheds new light on Fletcher’s intellectual life, his vision of history, and the interconnections between these plays and the rest of his canon.

Early Modern Liveness

Early Modern Liveness PDF

Author: Danielle Rosvally

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-01-26

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1350318493

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What does it mean for early modern theatre to be 'live'? How have audiences over time experienced a sense of 'liveness'? This collection extends discussions of liveness to works from the 16th and 17th centuries, both in their initial incarnations and contemporary adaptations. Drawing on theatre and performance studies, as well as media theory, this volume uses the concept of liveness to consider how early modern theatre – including non-Western and non-traditional performance – employs embodiment, materiality, temporality and perception to impress on its audience a sensation of presence. The volume's contributors adopt varying approaches and cover a range of topics from material and textual studies, to early modern rehearsal methods, to digital and VR theatre, to the legacy of Shakespearean performance in global theatrical repertoires. This collection uses both early modern and contemporary performance practices to challenge our understanding of live performance. Productions and adaptions discussed include the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream (2021), CREW's Hands on Hamlet (2017), Kit Monkman's Macbeth (2018), Arslanköy Theatre Company's Kraliçe Lear (2019), and a season of productions by the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival. Early Modern Liveness looks beyond theatrical events as primary sites of interpretive authority and examines the intimate and ephemeral experience of encountering early modern theatre in its diverse manifestations.

Shakespeare and the Admiral's Men

Shakespeare and the Admiral's Men PDF

Author: Tom Rutter

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-01-16

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1107077435

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This book examines the two-way influence between Shakespeare and his company's main competitors in the 1590s, the Admiral's Men. Providing a valuable addition to the thriving field of repertory studies, it offers new insights into Shakespeare's development as well as readings of important, sometimes neglected plays by his contemporaries.

Literature's Critique, Subversion, and Transformation of Justice

Literature's Critique, Subversion, and Transformation of Justice PDF

Author: Ruben Moi

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2024-03-15

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1666952591

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Literature’s Critique, Subversion, and Transformation of Justice explores two of the fundamental institutions in human existence and social democracy that attend to philosophical consideration and critical discussion of how literature interacts with the phenomena of justice.