The Almain in Britain, c.1549-c.1675

The Almain in Britain, c.1549-c.1675
Author: Ian Payne
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351546724

This complete scholarly edition of the collection of manuscript choreographies from c.1565-c.1675 associated with the Inns of Court is the first full-length study of these sources to be published. It offers practical reconstructions of the dances and provides a selection of musical settings simply but idiomatically arranged for four-part instrumental ensemble or keyboard. ? Part One centres on the manuscript sources which transmit the Almain, and on the trends and influences that shaped its evolution in Britain from c. 1549 to c. 1675, taking account of both music and choreography.? In viewing the Almain within its broader historical context, Ian Payne throws new light on the dance, arguing that, together with the ?measures? which accompany it in the choreographies, it owes an even greater debt to the English country dance than has hitherto been acknowledged, a popular style that received its fullest expression in Playford's English Dancing Master of 1651. ? The second part of the book focuses on the dances themselves. The steps are described in detail and reconstructions provided for the nine Almains and some of the other measures included in the manuscripts. Part Three comprises a complete critical edition of the manuscripts. ? These easily performable versions of the dances will be an invaluable aid to those wishing to learn the dances, reconstruct them for stagings of Shakespeare's plays or Jacobean masques, and for dance historians.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance
Author: Lynsey McCulloch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 718
Release: 2019-01-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190873493

Shakespeare's texts have a long and close relationship with many different types of dance, from dance forms referenced in the plays to adaptations across many genres today. With contributions from experienced and emerging scholars, this handbook provides a concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image. Motivated by growing interest in movement, materiality, and the body, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance is the first collection to examine the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance. In the handbook's first section - Shakespeare and Dance - authors consider dance within the context of early modern life and culture and investigate Shakespeare's use of dance forms within his writing. The latter half of the handbook - Shakespeare as Dance - explores the ways that choreographers have adapted Shakespeare's work. Chapters address everything from narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theater adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms such as Cambodian traditional dance or igal, an indigenous dance form from the southern Philippines. With a truly interdisciplinary approach, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance provides an indispensable resource for considerations of dance and corporeality on Shakespeare's stage and the early modern era.

Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750

Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750
Author: Jennifer Nevile
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2008-06-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 025321985X

From the mid-13th to the mid-18th century the ability to dance was an important social skill for both men and women. Dance performances were an integral part of court ceremonies and festivals and, in the 17th and 18th centuries, of commercial theatrical productions. Whether at court or in the public theater danced spectacles were multimedia events that required close collaboration among artists, musicians, designers, engineers, and architects as well as choreographers. In order to fully understand these practices, it is necessary to move beyond a consideration of dance alone, and to examine it in its social context. This original collection brings together the work of 12 scholars from the disciplines of dance and music history. Their work presents a picture of dance in society from the late medieval period to the middle of the 18th century and demonstrates how dance practices during this period participated in the intellectual, artistic, and political cultures of their day.

Queen Elizabeth I

Queen Elizabeth I
Author: Christa Jansohn
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9783825875299

This work marks the 400th anniversary of the death of one of England's greatest monarchs, a highly intelligent and successful ruler. The volume appeals to everyone interested in the charismatic character of Elizabeth I, her time and cultural afterlife. Contributors focus on important aspects of Elizabeth's subtle and resourceful political power and the longstanding struggle she faced at home and abroad as well as the threats posed to her realm. This edition presents a series of essays about fictional representations of Queen Elizabeth I in literature, music, and film. Articles illuminate the fascinating story of her numerous afterlives and their significance for the cultural history of England, its sense of identity and psyche. Essays investigate the ceremony, festivities, and dance practices at her court and bring to life the cultural significance of this colorful and extraordinary monarch. Christa Jansohn is professor of British culture at the University of Bamberg, Germany.

The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World

The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World
Author: Jennifer Mara DeSilva
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317016785

In the Early Modern period - as both reformed and Catholic churches strove to articulate orthodox belief and conduct through texts, sermons, rituals, and images - communities grappled frequently with the connection between sacred space and behavior. The Sacralization of Space and Behavior in the Early Modern World explores individual and community involvement in the approbation, reconfiguration and regulation of sacred spaces and the behavior (both animal and human) within them. The individual’s understanding of sacred space, and consequently the behavior appropriate within it, depended on local need, group dynamics, and the dissemination of normative expectations. While these expectations were defined in a growing body of confessionalizing literature, locally and internationally traditional clerical authorities found their decisions contested, circumvented, or elaborated in order to make room for other stakeholders’ activities and needs. To clearly reveal the efforts of early modern groups to negotiate authority and the transformation of behavior with sacred space, this collection presents examples that allow the deconstruction of these tensions and the exploration of the resulting campaigns within sacred space. Based on new archival research the eleven chapters in this collection examine diverse aspects of the campaigns to transform Christian behavior within a variety of types of sacred space and through a spectrum of media. These essays give voice to the arguments, exhortations, and accusations that surrounded the activities taking place in early modern sacred space and reveal much about how people made sense of these transformations.

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.

The Early Stuart Masque

The Early Stuart Masque
Author: Barbara Ravelhofer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2006-04-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191515981

The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music studies the complex impact of movements, costumes, words, scenes, music, and special effects in English illusionistic theatre of the Renaissance. Drawing on a massive amount of documentary evidence relating to English productions as well as spectacle in France, Italy, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire, the book elucidates professional ballet, theatre management, and dramatic performance at the early Stuart court. Individual studies take a fresh look at works by Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Carew, John Milton, William Davenant, and others, showing how court poets collaborated with tailors, designers, technicians, choreographers, and aristocratic as well as professional performers to create a dazzling event. Based on extensive archival research on the households of Queen Anne and Queen Henrietta Maria, special chapters highlight the artistic and financial control of Stuart queens over their masques and pastorals. Many plates and figures from German, Austrian, French, and English archives illustrate accessibly-written introductions to costume conventions, early dance styles, male and female performers, the dramatic symbolism of colours, and stage design in performance. With splendid costumes and choreographies, masques once appealed to the five senses. A tribute to their colourful brilliance, this book seeks to recover a lost dimension of performance culture in early modern England.

Visions of the Courtly Body

Visions of the Courtly Body
Author: Christiane Hille
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-01-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 305006255X

In 1603, the beginning of the Stuart reign, painting was of minor importance at the English court, where the elaborately designed masques of Inigo Jones served as the prime medium of royal representation. Only two decades later, their most celebrated performer, George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham had assembled one of the largest and most significant collections of painting in early seventeenth-century Europe. His career as the personal and political favourite of two succeeding monarchs – James I and Charles I – coincides with the commission of a number of highly ambitious portraits from the hands of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck that displayed his body in spectacular manner. As the first comprehensive study of Buckingham’s patronage of the visual arts, this book is concerned with the question of how the painted image of the courtier transferred strategies of social distinction that had originated in the masque to the language of painting. Establishing a new grammar in the competing rhetorics of bodily self-fashioning, this recast notion of portraiture contributed to an epistemological change in perceptions of visual representation at the early modern English court, in the course of which painting advanced to the central art form in the aesthetics of kingship.