Renaissance Drama in Action

Renaissance Drama in Action
Author: Martin White
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1134917813

Renaissance Drama in Action is a fascinating exploration of Renaissance theatre practice and staging. Covering questions of contemporary playhouse design, verse and language, staging and rehearsal practices, and acting styles, Martin White relates the characteristics of Renaissance theatre to the issues involved in staging the plays today. This refreshingly accessible volume: * examines the history of the plays on the English stage from the seventeenth century to the present day * explores questions arising from reconstructions, with particular reference to the new Globe Theatre * includes interviews with, and draws on the work and experience of modern theatre practitioners including Harriet Walter, Matthew Warchus, Trevor Nunn, Stephen Jeffreys, Adrian Noble and Helen Mirren * includes discussions of familiar plays such as The Duchess of Malfi and 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, as well as many lesser known play-texts Renaissance Drama in Action offers undergraduates and A-level students an invaluable guide to the characteristics of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and its relationship to contemporary theatre and staging.

The Bed-trick in English Renaissance Drama

The Bed-trick in English Renaissance Drama
Author: Marliss C. Desens
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 1994
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780874134766

None of these assumptions has been tested against the evidence of the surviving plays from the period - an oversight that the present study seeks to remedy.

Music and Gender in English Renaissance Drama

Music and Gender in English Renaissance Drama
Author: Katrine K. Wong
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136169695

This book offers a survey of how female and male characters in English Renaissance theatre participated and interacted in musical activities, both inside and outside the contemporary societal decorum. Wong’s analysis broadens our understanding of the general theatrical representation of music, or musical dramaturgy, and complicates the current discussion of musical portrayal and construction of gender during this period. Wong discusses dramaturgical meanings of music and its association with gender, love, and erotomania in Renaissance plays. The negotiation between the dichotomous qualities of the heavenly and the demonic finds extensive application in recent studies of music in early modern English plays. However, while ideological dualities identified in music in traditional Renaissance thinking may seem unequivocal, various musical representations of characters and situations in early modern drama would prove otherwise. Wong, building upon the conventional model of binarism, explores how playwrights created their musical characters and scenarios according to the received cultural use and perception of music, and, at the same time, experimented with the multivalent meanings and significance embodied in theatrical music.

Site Unscene

Site Unscene
Author: Jonathan Walker
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810135035

Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers’ sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama’s nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage. Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama. Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies.

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama
Author: John E. Curran
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-05-15
Genre: Characters and characteristics in literature
ISBN: 9781611495263

This book explores representations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside Shakespearean exceptionalism, the study reads a wide variety of plays to explain how intellectual context could allow for such characterization.

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy
Author: Emma Josephine Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2010-08-12
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0521519373

Introducing the reader to important topics in English Renaissance tragedy, this Companion presents fresh readings of key texts.

Renaissance Drama in Action

Renaissance Drama in Action
Author: Martin White
Publisher:
Total Pages: 265
Release: 1998
Genre: English drama
ISBN: 9786610064403

A fascinating exploration of Renaissance theatre practice and staging, which relates the characteristics of Renaissance theatre to the issues involved in staging the plays today. Plays discussed include 'The Duchess of Malfi'.

The Subject of Tragedy (Routledge Revivals)

The Subject of Tragedy (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Catherine Belsey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317744446

First published in 1985, The Subject of Tragedy takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for an analysis of the differential identities of man and woman. Catherine Belsey charts, in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity that is identifiably modern. The subject of liberal humanism – self-determining, free origin of language, choice and action – is highlighted as the product of a specific period in which man was the subject to which woman was related.

A Short History of English Renaissance Drama

A Short History of English Renaissance Drama
Author: Helen Hackett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2012-10-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857733028

Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.