The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy

The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy
Author: Adam Zucker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-03-10
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1107003083

An exploration of wit, witlessness and social and comic conventions in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries.

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage
Author: Andrew Bozio
Publisher:
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0198846568

The way that characters in early modern theatrical performance think through their surroundings is important in our understanding of perception, memory, and other forms of embodied affective thought. This book explores this concept in dramatic works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson.

Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama
Author: James M. Bromley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198867824

This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

Shakespeare Studies, vol. 43

Shakespeare Studies, vol. 43
Author: Diana E. Henderson
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2015-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0838644767

Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England

Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England
Author: Deutermann Allison Deutermann
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2016-05-31
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1474411282

Examines the impact of hearing on the formal and generic development of early modern theatreEarly modern drama was in fundamental ways an aural art form. How plays should sound, and how they should be heard, were vital questions to the formal development of early modern drama. Ultimately, they shaped the two of its most popular genres: revenge tragedy and city comedy. Simply put, theatregoers were taught to hear these plays differently. Revenge tragedies by Shakespeare and Kyd imagine sound stabbing, piercing, and slicing into listeners' bodies on and off the stage; while comedies by Jonson and Marston imagine it being sampled selectively, according to taste. Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England traces the dialectical development of these two genres and auditory modes over six decades of commercial theatre history, combining surveys of the theatrical marketplace with focused attention to specific plays and to the non-dramatic literature that gives this interest in audition texture: anatomy texts, sermons, music treatises, and manuals on rhetoric and poetics.Key Features Invites new attention to the theatre as something heard, rather than as something seen, in performanceProvides a model for understanding aesthetic forms as developing in competitive response to one another in particular historical circumstancesEnriches our sense of early modern playgoers' auditory experience, and of dramatists' attempt to shape it

Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools

Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools
Author: Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2020-06-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108859968

Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools is the first book to systematically analyze the role that the performing arts played in English schools after the Reformation. Although the material record is riddled with gaps, Amanda Eubanks Winkler sheds light on the subject through an innovative methodology that combines rigorous archival research with phenomenological and performance studies approaches. She organizes her study around a series of performance-based questions that demonstrate how the schoolroom intersected with the church, the court, the domicile, the concert room, and the professional theater, which allows her to provide fresh perspectives on well-known canonical operas performed by children, as well as lesser-known works. Eubanks Winkler also interrogates the notion that performance is ephemeral, as she considers how scores and playtexts serve as a conduit between past and present, and demonstrates the ways in which pedagogical performance is passed down through embodied praxis.

The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama

The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama
Author: Matthew Hunter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009050788

The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama examines how early modern plays celebrated the power of different styles of talk to create dynamic forms of public address. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, London expanded into an uncomfortably public city where everyone was a stranger to everyone else. The relentless anonymity of urban life spurred dreams of its opposite: of being a somebody rather than a nobody, of being the object of public attention rather than its subject. Drama gave life to this fantasy. Presented by strangers and to strangers, early modern plays codified different styles of talk as different forms of public sociability. Then, as now, to speak of style was to speak of a fantasy of public address. Offering fresh insight for scholars of literature and drama, Matthew Hunter reveals how this fantasy – which still holds us in its thrall – played out on the early modern stage.

Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
Author: Subha Mukherji
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030376516

Placing ‘literature’ at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this book offers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. It is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change and exchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless, lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginative kernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to some of its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In the process, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literary work to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.

Stereotypes and stereotyping in early modern England

Stereotypes and stereotyping in early modern England
Author: Koji Yamamoto
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526119153

Early modern stereotypes used to be studied as evidence of popular belief, something mired with prejudices and commonly held assumptions. Stereotypes and stereotyping in early modern England goes beyond this view by exploring practices of stereotyping as contested processes. To do so, the volume draws on recent works on social psychology and sociology. It thereby brings together early modern case studies and explores how stereotypes and their mobilisation shaped various negotiations of power, in spheres of life such as politics, religion, economy and knowledge production.