A Critical, Old-spelling Edition of The Birth of Merlin (Q 1662)

A Critical, Old-spelling Edition of The Birth of Merlin (Q 1662)
Author: Joanna Udall
Publisher: MHRA
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1991
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780947623340

Credited on its first title page to William Shakespeare and William Rowley, The Birth of Merlin continues to provoke speculation about its place in the Shakespeare 'Apocrypha'. The play is an imaginative re-working of the story of Merlin the Magician and his part in the struggle against the Saxon invasion of Britain. It contains not only scenes of love, war, and court politics, but a devil, a clown, and an unusual number of spectacular stage effects. This edition seeks to provide contexts for the play's diverse elements (chronicle history, romance, spectacle, and comedy), and considers its relationships with a wide variety of texts from Geoffrey of Monmouth and the English prose Brut to Shakespeare's Henry VIII.

Unfixable Forms

Unfixable Forms
Author: Katherine Schaap Williams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501753525

Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.

Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture

Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture
Author: Gary Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1184
Release: 2007
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0199678731

Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture is a comprehensive companion to The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, providing detailed introductions to and full editorial apparatus for the works themselves as well as a wealth of information about Middleton's historical and literary context.

None a Stranger There

None a Stranger There
Author: Scott Oldenburg
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2024
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0817361731

None a Stranger There offers a collection of wide-ranging essays that explore the creation and understanding of English identity through the lens of early modern drama. Drawing together a rich array of disciplines--literary criticism, theater history, linguistics, book history, and performance studies--the scholars in this collection illuminate how diverse or competing notions of "Englishness" can be seen and studied in early modern English plays. They are an especially fertile site of study because they enabled collective performances in a variety of settings, such as public theaters, royal courts, and streets. They engaged with live audiences from a cross section of society. The contributors also draw parallels in plays of the period between past and present. They identify vivid struggles over controversies--especially Brexit and neonationalism--that still bedevil Britain and much of the western world: attitudes about and experiences of immigrants; xenophobia and tolerance; multiculturalism, assimilation, and hybridity; patriotism and jingoism; racial and ethnic identity; border-making and border-crossing; transnational itinerancy; and other topics. None a Stranger There provides a nuanced understanding of how early modern dramatists shaped and responded to questions about English identity and its relationship with Europe and beyond. It emphasizes the fluidity and complexities of national identity, reminding us that these debates remain deeply relevant in an interconnected world. CONTRIBUTORS Heather Bailey / Todd Andrew Borlik / William Casey Caldwell / Matt Carter / Kevin Chovanec / John S. Garrison / Scott Oldenburg / Matteo Pangallo / Jamie Paris / Vimala C. Pasupathi / Kyle Pivetti / Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

Theatre and empire

Theatre and empire
Author: Tristan Marshall
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526134748

Theatre and empire looks at the genesis of British national identity in the reign of King James VI and I. While devolution is currently decentralising Britain, this book examines how the idea of a united kingdom was created in the first place. It does this by studying two things: the political language of the King's project to replace England, Scotland and Wales with a single kingdom of Great Britain; and cultural representations of empire on the public and private stages. The book argues that between 1603 and 1625 a group of playwrights celebrated a new national consciousness in works as diverse as Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Specifically Jacobean interdisciplinary studies are few compared with Elizabethan and Caroline works, but the book attempts to redress the balance by offering a fresh appraisal of James Stuart’s reign. Looking at both established and little-known plays and playwrights, Theatre and empire rewrites our understanding of the political and cultural context of the Jacobean stage.

In Defiance of Time

In Defiance of Time
Author: Angus Vine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2010-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199566194

In Defiance of Time contends that the antiquarian project, integral to early modern literary and intellectual culture, depended on the antiquaries' capacity to restore - in their imagination at least - the fragments of the past. It offers original readings of important authors such as Leland, Stow, Spenser, Camden, Drayton, and Selden.

Shakespeare: Text, Stage & Canon

Shakespeare: Text, Stage & Canon
Author: Richard Proudfoot
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2015-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474243002

Based on three lectures given by Professor Richard Proudfoot in October 1999 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of The Globe, The Arden Shakespeare's centenary and Professor Proudfoot's retirement from King's College; this enjoyable volume aims to give a general and non-specialist audience some sense of what scholarship has achieved in three critical areas of Shakespeare studies at the end of the twentieth century. Freshly and engagingly written, this lively volume will appeal to all those with an interest in Shakespeare studies.

The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform

The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform
Author: Gina M. Di Salvo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-07-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192689967

The age of miracles was not yet past on the Shakespearean stage. In the first book-length study of the English saint play across the Reformation divide, The Renaissance of the Saints after Reform recovers the surprisingly long theatrical life of the saints from a tenth-century monastery to the Restoration stage. Through a reassessment of archival records of performance and religious change, this book challenges the established history of the saint play as a product of medieval devotional culture that ended with the national conversion to Protestantism during the Reformation. Not only did saints in performance frequently diverge from the narratives of devotional literature during the Middle Ages but also saints made a spectacular reappearance in the theatre of the early modern era. In the rupture between those two eras, the English church separated itself from the Cult of the Saints, and saints disappeared from public view until sainthood transformed from a matter of theology into a matter of theatricality. Early modern saint plays document a post-Reformation culture committed to saints—but not all saints. Certain ancient martyrs and British saints returned to the liturgical calendar in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. This limited inventory performed an initial de-Catholicization of these saints, but it did not recover their lives. Instead, the theatre produced new lives of the saints for the English public. A period of experimentation with saints and devils in the 1590s was followed by unprecedented innovation throughout the Stuart era. This book traces the transformation of sainthood in early modern drama from ambiguous supernatural association and negotiated patronage to a renaissance of miraculous theatricality and sacred place-making. By excavating saints in plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger, and Rowley, as well as plays authored by relatively unknown dramatists, this book reconfigures how we think about the legacy of late medieval religious culture, the impact of Reformation change on literary texts and social practices, and the development of English theatre and drama.

Love Spells and Lost Treasure

Love Spells and Lost Treasure
Author: Tabitha Stanmore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2022-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009286730

Magic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early modern eras, practical magic by contrast – performed to a useful end for payment, and actually more common than malign spellcasting – has been overlooked. Exploring many hundred instances of daily magical usage, and setting these alongside a range of imaginative and didactic literatures, Tabitha Stanmore demonstrates the entrenched nature of 'service' magic in premodern English society. This, she shows, was a type of spellcraft for needs that nothing else could address: one well established by the time of the infamous witch trials. The book explores perceptions of magical practitioners by clients and neighbours, and the way such magic was utilised by everyone: from lowliest labourer to highest lord. Stanmore reveals that – even if technically illicit – magic was for most people an accepted, even welcome, aspect of everyday life.