Shakespeare and Modern Theatre
Author: Michael Bristol
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-07-08
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 1134601204
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance
Author: Robert Henke
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2015-08
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 1609383613
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre and Performance takes a transnational approach, which reveals a greater range of attitudes and charitable practices regarding the poor than state poor laws and rogue books suggest. Close study of German and Latin beggar catalogues, popular songs performed in Italian piazzas, the Paduan actor-playwright Ruzante, the commedia dell’arte in both Italy and France, and Shakespeare demonstrate how early modern theatre and performance could reveal the gap between official policy and actual practices regarding the poor. The actor-based theatre and performance traditions examined in this study, which persistently explore felt connections between the itinerant actor and the vagabond beggar, evoke the poor through complex and variegated forms of imagination, thought, and feeling. Early modern theatre does not simply reflect the social ills of hunger, poverty, and degradation, but works them through the forms of poverty, involving displacement, condensation, exaggeration, projection, fictionalization, and marginalization. As the critical mass of medieval charity was put into question, the beggar-almsgiver encounter became more like a performance. But it was not a performance whose script was prewritten as the inevitable exposure of the dissembling beggar. Just as people’s attitudes toward the poor could rapidly change from skepticism to sympathy during famines and times of acute need, fictions of performance such as Edgar’s dazzling impersonation of a mad beggar in Shakespeare’s King Lear could prompt responses of sympathy and even radical calls for economic redistribution.
Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare's Theatre
Author: Laurie Johnson
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-03-26
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 1134449216
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in Shakespeare’s world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern ‘body-mind’ in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of Shakespeare’s theatre or on our histories of the early modern period, broadly speaking? This book provides a wide range of approaches to this challenge, covering histories of cognition, studies of early modern stage practices, textual studies, and historical phenomenology, as well as new cultural histories by some of the key proponents of this approach at the present time. Because of the breadth of material covered, full weight is given to issues that are hotly debated at the present time within Shakespeare Studies: presentist scholarship is presented alongside more historically-focused studies, for example, and phenomenological studies of material culture are included along with close readings of texts. What the contributors have in common is a refusal to read the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries either psychologically or materially; instead, these essays address a willingness to study early modern phenomena (like the Elizabethan stage) as manifesting an early modern belief in the embodiment of cognition.
Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance
Author: Farah Karim Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-01-05
Total Pages: 317
ISBN-13: 1408174642
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.
Shakespeare, Our Contemporary
Author: Jan Kott
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2015-01-21
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 0804152195
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage conceptions. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961, and readers all over the world have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched.
Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre
Author: Douglas Bruster
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-08-02
Total Pages: 221
ISBN-13: 1134313705
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces, authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way, prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders of cultural practice and perception. Close readings of prologues by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays' socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and action.
Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre
Author: Susan Zimmerman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2019-08-08
Total Pages: 226
ISBN-13: 0748680764
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, psychoanalysis and anthropology, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the 'dead' in early modern English culture.Susan Zimmerman argues that concepts of the corpse as a semi-animate, generative and indeterminate entity were deeply rooted in medieval religious culture. Such concepts ran counter to early modern discourses that sought to harden categorical distinctions between body/spirit, animate/inanimate - in particular, the attacks of Reformists on the materiality of 'dead' idols, and the rationale of the new anatomy for publicly dissecting 'dead' bodies. Zimmerman contends that within this context, theatrical representations of the corpse or corpse/revenant - as seen here in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries - uniquely showcased the theatre's own ideological and performative agency. Features*Original in its conjunction of critical theory (Bataille, Kristeva, Lacan, Benjamin) with an historical account of the shifting status of the corpse in late medieval and early modern England.*The first study to demonstrate connections between the meanings attached to the material body in early modern Protestantism, the practice of anatomical dissection, and the English public theatre.*Strong market appeal to scholars and graduate students with interests in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern religion and science, and literary theory. *Relevant to advanced undergraduates taking widely taught courses in Shakespeare and in Renaissance drama.
Shakespeare on Theatre
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Published: 2013-04-01
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 1623160332
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →(Book). Shakespeare was a man of the theatre to his core, so it is no surprise that he repeatedly contemplated the nuts and bolts of his craft in his plays and poems. Shakespeare scholar Nick de Somogyi here draws together all the cherishable set pieces including "All the world's a stage," Hamlet's encounters with the Players, and Bottom's amateur theatricals along with many other oblique but no less revealing glances, and further insights into theatre practice by Shakespeare's contemporaries and rivals. De Somogyi's commentary takes us through the entire process of Shakespeare's theatrical production, from its casting and auditions, via rehearsals, costumes, and props, to its premiere and audience reception. Shakespeare on Theatre eavesdrops on the urgently whispered noises-off in the "tiring-house" and inhales the heady aroma of the Globe's first audiences.
Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre
Author: Douglas Bruster
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-08-02
Total Pages: 181
ISBN-13: 1134313713
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This remarkable study shows how prologues ushered audience and actors through a rite of passage and how they can be seen to offer rich insight into what the early modern theatre was thought capable of achieving.
Transnational connections in early modern theatre
Author: M. A. Katritzky
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-11-25
Total Pages: 487
ISBN-13: 1526139197
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume explores the transnationality and interculturality of early modern performance in multiple languages, cultures, countries and genres. Its twelve essays compose a complex image of theatre connections as a socially, economically, politically and culturally rich tissue of networks and influences. With particular attention to itinerant performers, court festival, and the Black, Muslim and Jewish impact, they combine disciplines and methods to place Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the wider context of performance culture in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Czech and Italian speaking Europe. The authors examine transnational connections by offering multidisciplinary perspectives on the theatrical significance of concrete historical facts: archaeological findings, archival records, visual artefacts, and textual evidence.
