Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare

Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare
Author: Sophie Chiari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2019-10-24
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108486673

A fascinating insight into court entertainment - encompassing dance, music and performance - in the age of Shakespeare.

The Age of Shakespeare

The Age of Shakespeare
Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2004-02-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1588363481

In The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode uses the history and culture of the Elizabethan era to enlighten us about William Shakespeare and his poetry and plays. Opening with the big picture of the religious and dynastic events that defined England in the age of the Tudors, Kermode takes the reader on a tour of Shakespeare’s England, vividly portraying London’s society, its early capitalism, its court, its bursting population, and its epidemics, as well as its arts—including, of course, its theater. Then Kermode focuses on Shakespeare himself and his career, all in the context of the time in which he lived. Kermode reads each play against the backdrop of its probable year of composition, providing new historical insights into Shakspeare’s characters, themes, and sources. The result is an important, lasting, and concise companion guide to the works of Shakespeare by one of our most eminent literary scholars.

Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare

Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare
Author: Sophie Chiari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-10-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108773958

Even though Shakespeare openly dramatizes aristocratic shows in his own plays, the circumstances of early modern performance at court have received relatively little critical attention. With so much written on the playwright's wide and multi-layered audiences, the entertainment of the court itself has too long been dismissed as a secondary issue. This book aims to shed fresh light on the multiple aspects of Shakespearean performances at the Elizabethan and early Stuart courts, considering all forms of drama, music, dance and other entertainment. Taking the specific scenic environment and material conditions of early modern performance into account, the chapters examine both real and dramatized court shows in order to break ground for new avenues of thought. The volume considers how early modern court shows shaped dramatic writing and what they tell us of the aesthetics and politics of the Tudor and Stuart regimes.

Age in Love

Age in Love
Author: Jacqueline Vanhoutte
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496207599

The title Age in Love is taken from Shakespeare’s sonnet 138, a poem about an aging male speaker who, by virtue of his entanglement with the dark lady, “vainly” performs the role of “some untutor’d youth.” Jacqueline Vanhoutte argues that this pattern of “age in love” pervades Shakespeare’s mature works, informing his experiments in all the dramatic genres. Bottom, Malvolio, Claudius, Falstaff, and Antony all share with the sonnet speaker a tendency to flout generational decorum by assuming the role of the lover, normally reserved in Renaissance culture for young men. Hybrids and upstarts, cross-dressers and shape-shifters, comic butts and tragic heroes—Shakespeare’s old-men-in-love turn in boundary-blurring performances that probe the gendered and generational categories by which early modern subjects conceived of identity. In Age in Love Vanhoutte shows that questions we have come to regard as quintessentially Shakespearean—about the limits of social mobility, the nature of political authority, the transformative powers of the theater, the vagaries of human memory, or the possibility of secular immortality—come to indelible expression through Shakespeare’s artful deployment of the “age in love” trope. Age in Love contributes to the ongoing debate about the emergence of a Tudor public sphere, building on the current interest in premodern constructions of aging and ultimately demonstrating that the Elizabethan court shaped Shakespeare’s plays in unexpected and previously undocumented ways.

Shakespeare on Theatre

Shakespeare on Theatre
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1623160332

(Book). Shakespeare was a man of the theatre to his core, so it is no surprise that he repeatedly contemplated the nuts and bolts of his craft in his plays and poems. Shakespeare scholar Nick de Somogyi here draws together all the cherishable set pieces including "All the world's a stage," Hamlet's encounters with the Players, and Bottom's amateur theatricals along with many other oblique but no less revealing glances, and further insights into theatre practice by Shakespeare's contemporaries and rivals. De Somogyi's commentary takes us through the entire process of Shakespeare's theatrical production, from its casting and auditions, via rehearsals, costumes, and props, to its premiere and audience reception. Shakespeare on Theatre eavesdrops on the urgently whispered noises-off in the "tiring-house" and inhales the heady aroma of the Globe's first audiences.

England in the Age of Shakespeare

England in the Age of Shakespeare
Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2019-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253042321

A social history of Renaissance England that raises the curtain on the cultural influences that inspired Shakespeare’s plays. How did it feel to hear Macbeth’s witches chant of “double, double toil and trouble” at a time when magic and witchcraft were as real as anything science had to offer? How were justice and forgiveness understood by the audience who first watched King Lear; how were love and romance viewed by those who first saw Romeo and Juliet? In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard’s era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized. These moments of recognition often reflected the audience’s own experiences of what it was to, as Hamlet says, “grunt and sweat under a weary life.” Black’s clear and sweeping approach seeks to reclaim Shakespeare from the ivory tower and make the plays’ histories more accessible to the public for whom the plays were always intended.

The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare

The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare
Author: Bruce R. Smith
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: LITERARY CRITICISM
ISBN: 9781107057258

This transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary work will be of interest to students, theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.

Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood

Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood
Author: Grace Ioppolo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134300050

This book presents new evidence about the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton composed their plays and the degree to which they participated in the dissemination of their texts to theatrical audiences. Grace Ioppolo argues that the path of the transmission of the text was not linear, from author to censor to playhouse to audience - as has been universally argued by scholars - but circular. Extant dramatic manuscripts, theatre records and accounts, as well as authorial contracts, memoirs, receipts and other archival evidence, are used to prove that the text returned to the author at various stages, including during rehearsal and after performance. This monograph provides much new information and case studies, and is a fascinating contribution to the fields of Shakespeare studies, English Renaissance drama studies, manuscript studies, textual study and bibliography and theatre history.

Shakespeare / Play

Shakespeare / Play
Author: Emma Whipday
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2024-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135030445X

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.