Playgoing in Shakespeare's London

Playgoing in Shakespeare's London PDF

Author: Andrew Gurr

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-09-19

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9780521574495

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This is a new edition of Andrew Gurr's classic account of the people for whom Shakespeare wrote his plays. Gurr assembles all the evidence from the writings of the time to describe the physical structure of the different types of playhouse, the services provided in the auditorium, the cost of a ticket and a cushion, the size of the crowds, the smells, the pickpockets, and the collective feelings generated by the plays. Since 1987 there have been many new discoveries about Shakespeare's theatres. Gurr introduces fresh evidence about the experience of attending a play in Shakespeare's time, adds more than thirty new entries to his account of the early playgoers and provides a select bibliography.

Playgoing in Shakespeare's London

Playgoing in Shakespeare's London PDF

Author: Andrew Gurr

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780521543224

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This is a newly revised edition of Andrew Gurr's classic account of the people for whom Shakespeare wrote his plays. Gurr assembles evidence from the writings of the time to describe the physical, social and mental conditions of playgoing. For this edition, as well as revising and adding new material which has emerged since the second edition, Gurr develops new sections about points of special interest. Fifty new entries have been added to the list of playgoers and there are a dozen fresh quotations about the experience of playgoing.

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England

Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Allison P. Hobgood

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-01-23

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1107783054

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Allison P. Hobgood tells a new story about the emotional experiences of theatregoers in Renaissance England. Through detailed case studies of canonical plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Kyd and Heywood, the reader will discover what it felt like to be part of performances in English theatre and appreciate the key role theatregoers played in the life of early modern drama. How were spectators moved - by delight, fear or shame, for example - and how did their own reactions in turn make an impact on stage performances? Addressing these questions and many more, this book discerns not just how theatregoers were altered by drama's affective encounters, but how they were undeniable influences upon those encounters. Overall, Hobgood reveals a unique collaboration between the English world and stage, one that significantly reshapes the ways we watch, read and understand early modern drama.

Shakespeare and Child's Play

Shakespeare and Child's Play PDF

Author: Carol Chillington Rutter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-11-13

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1134216696

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Shakespeare wrote more than fifty parts for children, amounting to the first comprehensive portrait of childhood in the English theatre. Focusing mostly on boys, he put sons against fathers, servants against masters, innocence against experience, testing the notion of masculinity, manners, morals, and the limits of patriarchal power. He explored the nature of relationships and ideas about parenting in terms of nature and nurture, permissiveness and discipline, innocence and evil. He wrote about education, adolescent rebellion, delinquency, fostering, and child-killing, as well as the idea of the redemptive child who ‘cures’ diseased adult imaginations. ‘Childness’ – the essential nature of being a child – remains a vital critical issue for us today. In Shakespeare and Child’s-Play Carol Rutter shows how recent performances on stage and film have used the range of Shakespeare’s insights in order to re-examine and re-think these issues in terms of today’s society and culture.

Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance

Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance PDF

Author: Paul Yachnin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1317056493

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Theatrical performance, suggest the contributors to this volume, can be an unpredictable, individual experience as well as a communal, institutional or cultural event. The essays collected here use the tools of theatre history in their investigation into the phenomenology of the performance experience, yet they are also careful to consider the social, ideological and institutional contingencies that determine the production and reception of the living spectacle. Thus contributors combine a formalist interest in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of language and spectacle with an investment in the material cultures that both produced and received Shakespeare's plays. Six of the chapters focus on early modern cultures of performance, looking specifically at such topics as the performance of rusticity; the culture of credit; contract and performance; the cultivation of Englishness; religious ritual; and mourning and memory. Building upon and interrelating with the preceding essays, the last three chapters deal with Shakespeare and performance culture in modernity. They focus on themes including literary and theatrical performance anxiety; cultural iconicity; and the performance of Shakespearean lateness. This collection strives to bring better understanding to Shakespeare's imaginative investment in the relationship between theatrical production and the emotional, intellectual and cultural effects of performance broadly defined in social terms.

Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox

Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox PDF

Author: Peter G. Platt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1317056523

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Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.