The Absence of America on the Early Modern Stage

The Absence of America on the Early Modern Stage PDF

Author: Gavin R. Hollis

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 728

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

invoked by a play and the world outside that play. America emerges most often at these points of intersection between stage and audience, between playing-company and playgoer: in plays which feature Christian Europeans disguising themselves as Indians, in plays which are set in London or on unnamed, unknown islands, and even in plays whose plots seem to have little to do with America.

The Absence of America

The Absence of America PDF

Author: Gavin Hollis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-09-17

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0191053732

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576â1642 examines why early modern drama's response to English settlement in the New World was muted, even though the so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration: no play is set in the Americas; few plays treat colonization as central to the plot; a handful features Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise). However, advocates of colonialism in the seventeenth century denounced playing companies as enemies on a par with the Pope and the Devil. Instead of writing off these accusers as paranoid cranks, this book takes as its starting point the possibility that they were astute playgoers. By so doing we can begin to see the emergence of a "picture of America," and of the Virginia colony in particular, across a number of plays performed for London audiences: Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and his collaboration with Marston and Chapman, Eastward Ho!; Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso; Massinger's The City Madam; Massinger and Fletcher's The Sea Voyage; Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl; Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Fletcher and Shakespeare's Henry VIII. We can glean the significance of this picture, not only for the troubled Virginia Company, but also for London theater audiences. And we can see that the picture that was beginning to form was, as the anti-theatricalists surmised, often slanderous, condemnatory, and, as it were, anti-American.

The Absence of America

The Absence of America PDF

Author: Gavin Hollis

Publisher: Early Modern Literary Geograph

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0198734328

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

'The Absence of America' looks at London theatre at the time of Shakespeare and how it represented the New World, considering whether early modern drama was anti-American, as some contemporaries suggested.

Publicity and the Early Modern Stage

Publicity and the Early Modern Stage PDF

Author: Allison K. Deutermann

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-05-07

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 3030523322

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity’s production. The men and women associated with playing—not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions—introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.

Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England

Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Alanna Skuse

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-02-18

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1108911501

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Offering an innovative perspective on early modern debates concerning embodiment, Alanna Skuse examines diverse kinds of surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and amputation to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound socio-economic and philosophical consequences. They reached beyond the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to develop searching questions about the nature of body integrity and its relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one's identity, or a mere 'prison' for the mind? How was the body connected to personal morality? What happened to the altered body after death? Drawing on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises, plays, poems, newspaper reports and travel writings, this volume will argue the answers to these questions were flexible, divergent and often surprising, and helped to shape early modern thoughts on philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Indography

Indography PDF

Author: J. Harris

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-05-07

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1137090766

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that has still not shed deeply ingrained imperialist habits of marking difference.

Renaissance Drama 39

Renaissance Drama 39 PDF

Author: Jeffrey Masten

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2011-02-25

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0810127385

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance.

Sacred Seeds

Sacred Seeds PDF

Author: Edward McLean Test

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1496207882

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

More than five hundred years after the fact, present-day writers still use hyperbolic adjectives to describe the “discovery” of the Americas. Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic—and the age of exploration that ensued—dramatically and forever changed the early modern world. The societies, economies, cultures, arts, and burgeoning sciences of Europe were quickly transformed by the ongoing encounter with the New World. The meeting of the New and the Old Worlds, however, was more than a meeting of disparate civilizations. It was also a confluence of exciting and often surprising associations that continually created new interfaces between materials and knowledge. The Western and Eastern Hemispheres, brought together by sailing ships for the first time on a large scale, helped create the global landscape we take for granted today. Central to this formative moment in global history were New World plants. The agriculture of indigenous peoples mythically and materially shaped English society and, subsequently, its literature in new and startling ways. Sacred Seeds examines New World plants—tobacco, amaranth, guaiacum, and the prickly pear cactus—and their associated Native myths as they moved across the Atlantic and into English literature. Edward McLean Test reinstates the contributions of indigenous peoples to European society, charting an alternative cultural history that explores the associations and assemblages of transatlantic multiplicity rather than Eurocentric homogeny.

Dramatic Geography

Dramatic Geography PDF

Author: Laurence Publicover

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-09-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0192529749

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Focusing on early modern plays which stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, this book asks how a sense of geographical location was created in early modern theatres that featured minimal scenery. While previous studies have stressed these plays' connections to a historical Mediterranean in which England was increasingly involved, this volume demonstrates how their dramatic geography was shaped through a literary and theatrical heritage. Reading canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, and The Tempest alongside lesser-known dramas such as Soliman and Perseda, Guy of Warwick, and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Dramatic Geography illustrates how early modern dramatists staging foreign worlds drew upon a romance tradition dating back to the medieval period, and how they responded to one another's plays to create an 'intertheatrical geography'. These strategies shape the plays' wider meanings in important ways, and could only have operated within the theatrical environment peculiar to early modern London: one in which playwrights worked in close proximity, in one instance perhaps even living together while composing Mediterranean dramas, and one where they could expect audiences to respond to subtle generic and intertextual negotiations. In reassessing this group of plays, Laurence Publicover brings into conversation scholarship on theatre history, cultural encounter, and literary geography; the book also contributes to current debates in early modern studies regarding the nature of dramatic authorship, the relationship between genre and history, and the continuities that run between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel

Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel PDF

Author: Jennifer Linhart Wood

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 3030122247

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and at King’s College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with the familiar self on the same frequency of vibration.