The Dutch Courtesan

The Dutch Courtesan PDF

Author: John Marston

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-04-05

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1472568974

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The Dutch Courtesan is a riotous tragicomedy that explores the delights and perils afforded by Jacobean London. While Freevill, an educated young Englishman and the play's nominal hero, frolics in the city's streets, taverns and brothels, Franceschina, his cast-off mistress and the Dutch courtesan of the play's title,laments his betrayal and plots revenge. Juxtaposing Franceschina's vulnerable financial position against the unappealing marital prospects available to gentry women, the play undermines the language of romance, revealing it to be rooted in the commerce and commodification. Marston's commentary on financial insecurity and the hypocritical repudiation of foreignness makes The Dutch Courtesan truly a document for our time.

The Dutch Wife

The Dutch Wife PDF

Author: Ellen Keith

Publisher: Harlequin

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1488098662

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A sweeping story of love and survival during World War II AMSTERDAM, MAY 1943. As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labor camp or—for a chance at survival—to join the camp brothel. On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl MŸller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father’s expectations of wartime glory. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever. Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner’s ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave. From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances. Don’t miss THE DUTCH ORPHAN! Ellen's next riveting novel set about a woman who must choose between family loyalty and her own safety.

The Malcontent

The Malcontent PDF

Author: John Marston

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-07-08

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1408144492

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"This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections that ever conversed with nature: a man, or rather a monster, more discontent than Lucifer." The Malcontent is a striking example of the new satiric tone and moral seriousness in English comedy of the early 1600s. The play's vision of a fallen humanity driven by lust and ambition is created partly by its depiction of Machiavellian intrigue in the court of Genoa, and partly by the disaffected Malevole, the malcontent of the title, who is actually the deposed Duke Altofronto in disguise. Marston's tragi-comedy is full of reversals, surprises and moral transformations and offers a thin disguise for the Jacobean court and its vices. This new student edition contains a lengthy new Introduction with background on the author, date and sources, theme, critical interpretation and stage history.

Courtesan

Courtesan PDF

Author: Diane Haeger

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2006-07-25

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 0307347095

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Amid the disapproving gossip of the Court, a royal romance defies all obstacles. The Court of François I is full of lust, intrigue, and bawdy bon temps—a different world from the quiet country life Diane de Poitiers led with her elderly husband. Now a widow, the elegant Diane is called back to Court, where the King’s obvious interest marks her as an enemy to the King’s favourite, Anne d’Heilly. The Court is soon electrified by rumors of their confrontations. As Anne calls on her most venomous tricks to drive Diane away, Diane finds an ally in the one member of Court with no allegiance to the King’s mistress: his teenage second son, Henri. Neglected by his father and disliked by his brothers, Prince Henri expects little from his life. But as his friendship with Diane deepens into infatuation and then a romance that scandalizes the Court, the Prince begins to discover hope for a future with Diane. But fate and his father have other plans for Henri—including a political marriage with Catherine de Medici. Despite daunting obstacles, Henri’s devotion to Diane never wanes; their passion becomes one of the most legendary romances in the history of France. Also available as an eBook

Strangeness in Jacobean Drama

Strangeness in Jacobean Drama PDF

Author: Callan Davies

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 100017431X

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Callan Davies presents “strangeness” as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama—one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as “Shakespeare’s late plays,” “tragicomedy,” or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

A Tangled Web: Mata Hari

A Tangled Web: Mata Hari PDF

Author: Mary W. Craig

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2017-07-14

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0750984724

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In this new biography, published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of her execution, Mata Hari is revealed in all of her flawed eccentricity; a woman whose adult life was a fantastical web of lies, half-truths and magnetic sexuality that captivated men. Following the death of a young son and a bitter divorce, Mata Hari reinvented herself as an exotic dancer in Paris, before finally taking up the life of a courtesan. She could have remained a half-forgotten member of France's grande horizontale were it not for the First World War and her disastrous decision to become embroiled in espionage. What happened next was part farce and part tragedy that ended in her execution in October 1917. Recruited by both the Germans and the French as a spy, Mata Hari – codenamed H-21 – was also almost recruited by the Russians. But the harmless fantasies and lies she had told on stage had become part of the deadly game of double agents during wartime. Struggling with the huge cost of war, the French authorities needed to catch a spy. Mata Hari, the dancer, the courtesan, the fantasist, became the prize catch.

Plotting Early Modern London

Plotting Early Modern London PDF

Author: Dieter Mehl

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1351910698

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With the publication of Brian Gibbons's Jacobean City Comedy thirty-five years ago, the urban satires by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton attained their 'official status as a Renaissance subgenre' that was distinct, by its farcical humour and ironic tone, from 'citizen comedy' or 'London drama' more generally. This retrospective genre-building has proved immensely fruitful in the study of early modern English drama; and although city comedies may not yet rival Shakespeare's plays in the amount of editorial work and critical acclaim they receive, both the theatrical contexts and the dramatic complexity of the genre itself, and its interrelations with Shakespearean drama justly command an increasing level of attention. Looking at a broad range of plays written between the 1590s and the 1630s - master-pieces of the genre like Eastward Ho, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Dutch Courtesan and The Devil is an Ass, blends of romance and satire like The Shoemaker's Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and bourgeois oddities in the Shakespearean manner like The London Prodigal - the twelve essays in this volume re-examine city comedy in the light of recently foregrounded historical contexts such as early modern capitalism, urban culture, the Protestant Reformation, and playhouse politics. Further, they explore the interrelations between city comedy and Shakespearean comedy both from the perspective of author rivalry and in terms of modern adaptations: the twenty-first-century concept of 'popular Shakespeare' (above all in the movie sector) seems to realign the comparatively time- and placeless Shakespearean drama with the gritty, noisy and bustling urban scene that has been city comedy's traditional preserve.