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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 f...
"Those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its center, and never more so than with the rogues of early modern England. Whether as social fact or literary fiction-or both, simultaneously-the marginal rogue became ideologically central and has remained so for historians, cultural critics, and literary critics alike. In this collection, early modern rogues represent the range, diversity, and tensions within early modern scholarship, making this quite simply the best overview of their significance then and now." -Jonathan Dollimore, York University "Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is an up-to-date and suggestive collection on a subject that all scholars of t...
Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein is a tribute to one of the most prominent Shakespeareans in the last half of the twentieth century, past president of the Shakespeare Association of America, and author of Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery, and Other texts. Twelve original contributions by an international group of scholars, including some of the most prominent working in Shakespeare studies today, use a variety of theoretical perspectives to address issues of contemporary import in the dramatic texts. Janus-like, the collection suggests the directions of Shakespeare studies at the outset of the new millennium while considering their roots in the last.
"The late Harriett Hawkins was a senior research fellow of Linacre College, Oxford University, and author of several influential works of Renaissance literary criticism and cultural studies such as Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama; Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth; The Devil's Party; Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in "High" Literature and Popular Modern Genres; and Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory. Her friends, family, and colleagues pay tribute to her sense of style - personal and literary - with essays inspired by her own interdisciplinary interests and high scholarly standards."--Jacket
This book constitutes a new direction for feminist studies in English Renaissance drama. While feminist scholars have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Displacing prevailing arguments of "victim feminism," the contributors to this volume engage a wide range of feminist theories, and argue that female protagonists in tragedies - Jocasta, Juliet, Cleopatra, Mariam, Webster's Duchess and White Devil, among others - are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts.
An investigation of a wide range of contemporary sources, from domestic conduct guides to emblem books, this study offers fresh perspectives on both culture and literature.
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 The first social and cultural history of vagrancy between 1650 and 1750, this book combines sources from across England and the Atlantic world to describe the shifting and desperate experiences of the very poorest and most marginalized of people in early modernity; the outcasts, the wandering destitute, the disabled veteran, the aged labourer, the solitary pregnant woman on the road and those referred to as vagabonds and beggars are all explored in this comprehensive account of the subject. Using a rich array of archival and literary sources, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750 offers a history not only of the experiences of vagrants themselves, but also of how the settled 'better sort' perceived vagrancy, how it was culturally represented in both popular and elite literature as a shadowy underworld of dissembling rogues, gypsies, and pedlars, and how these representations powerfully affected the lives of vagrants themselves. Hitchcock's is an important study for all scholars and students interested in the social and cultural history of early modern England.
When it was first published, Radical Tragedy was hailed as a groundbreaking reassessment of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An engaged reading of the past with compelling contemporary significance, Radical Tragedy remains a landmark study of Renaissance drama and a classic of cultural materialist criticism. The corrected and reissued third edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a candid new Preface by the author and features a Foreword by Terry Eagleton.
This book provides new insights into how theatre responded to changing economic practices and structures. It reviews discourses on household management and commerce to create a rich context for the discussion of socio-economic actions and transactions in Macbeth, Othello, and Timon of Athens, as well as in city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. By approaching discourses on economy and commerce as complementary, the book opens up a diverse field of socio-economic practices, including the gendered division of duties in the household, new modes of valuation, and evolving credit instruments. Theatre provides unique access to this field. In contrast to practical and policy-oriented dis...
This study examines the structural similarities between English mercantile treatises and drama c1600-1642. Bradley D. Ryner analyses the representational conventions of plays and mercantile treatises written between the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600 and the closing of the public playhouses at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642. He shows that playwrights' manipulation of specific elements of theatrical representation - such as metaphor, props, dramatic character, stage space, audience interaction, and genre - exacerbated the tension between the aspects of the world taken into account by a particular representation and those aspects that it neglects.