Theatre and the English Public from Reformation to Revolution

Theatre and the English Public from Reformation to Revolution
Author: Katrin Beushausen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-04-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316856739

This book presents new and overarching perspectives on the relationship between theatre and public from the Henrician Reformation through the interregnum to the Restoration, combining vivid case studies with discussion of theatre's continued importance in shaping the early modern public. Considered from the vantage point of theatre, the early modern public becomes visible as an unruly agent of political change, a force that authorities both feared and appealed to, and one that proved ultimately beyond control. It was through theatrical strategies that rulers and their opposition addressed the early modern public, and in turn it was theatre's public potential that shaped the development of the stage during the revolutionary years of the seventeenth century. In this volume, Katrin Beushausen examines sources including irreverent satirical pamphlets, regal spectacles, anti-theatrical polemic and visions of state theatres, casting new light on the development of the early modern public and theatre.

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England
Author: Joseph Mansky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2023-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009362763

The first comprehensive history of the Elizabethan libel, this interdisciplinary account traces a viral and often virulent media ecosystem.

Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars

Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars
Author: Heidi Craig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009224042

Focusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.

Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts

Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts
Author: Matthew Reason
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 774
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000537986

The Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts represents a truly multi-dimensional exploration of the inter-relationships between audiences and performance. This study considers audiences contextually and historically, through both qualitative and quantitative empirical research, and places them within appropriate philosophical and socio-cultural discourses. Ultimately, the collection marks the point where audiences have become central and essential not just to the act of performance itself but also to theatre, dance, opera, music and performance studies as academic disciplines. This Companion will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates, as well as to theatre, dance, opera and music practitioners and performing arts organisations and stakeholders involved in educational activities.

Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660-1745

Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660-1745
Author: Elaine M. McGirr
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780874130430

This book explores a cultural language, the heroic, that remained consistently powerful through the social, political, and dynastic turbulence of the long eighteenth century. The heroic provided an accessible and vivid shorthand for the ongoing ideological debates over the nature of authority and power, the construction of an ideal masculinity, and the shape of a new. British--rather than English--national identity. An analysis of this cultural language and its different valence over time not only unpacks the overlap between aesthetic and political debate in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but also firmly grounds the eighteenth-century's revolution in taste and manners in the ongoing ideological debates about dynastic politics and the foundations of authority. Specifically, the book traces the making and breaking of the Stuart mythology through the development of and attacks on the heroic mode from the Restoration through the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite uprising. Elaine McGirr is a Senior Lecturer in the departments of drama and English at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Theatre

The Theatre
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1894
Genre: Actors
ISBN:

Vol. for 1888 includes dramatic directory for Feb.-Dec.; vol. for 1889 includes dramatic directory for Jan.-May.

The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution

The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution
Author: Michael J. Braddick
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 713
Release: 2015-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191667277

This Handbook brings together leading historians of the events surrounding the English revolution, exploring how the events of the revolution grew out of, and resonated, in the politics and interactions of the each of the Three Kingdoms - England, Scotland, and Ireland. It captures a shared British and Irish history, comparing the significance of events and outcomes across the Three Kingdoms. In doing so, the Handbook offers a broader context for the history of the Scottish Covenanters, the Irish Rising of 1641, and the government of Confederate Ireland, as well as the British and Irish perspective on the English civil wars, the English revolution, the Regicide, and Cromwellian period. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution explores the significance of these events on a much broader front than conventional studies. The events are approached not simply as political, economic, and social crises, but as challenges to the predominant forms of religious and political thought, social relations, and standard forms of cultural expression. The contributors provide up-to-date analysis of the political happenings, considering the structures of social and political life that shaped and were re-shaped by the crisis. The Handbook goes on to explore the long-term legacies of the crisis in the Three Kingdoms and their impact in a wider European context.

Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage

Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage
Author: Betsy Bolton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2001-04-19
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521771160

This 2001 book examines how Romantic women performers and playwrights used theatrical conventions to intervene in politics.

Theatrical Milton

Theatrical Milton
Author: Brendan Prawdzik
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474421024

Theatrical Milton brings coherence to the presence of theatre in John Milton through the concept of theatricality. In this book, 'theatricality' identifies a discursive field entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing, as an act of theatre. Political and theological cultures in seventeenth-century England developed a treasury of representational resources in order to stage-to satirize and, above all, to de-legitimate-rhetors of politics, religion, and print. At the core of Milton's works is a contradictory relation to theatre that has neither been explained nor properly explored. This book changes the terms of scholarly discussion and discovers how the social structures of theatre afforded Milton resources for poetic and polemical representation and uncovers the precise contours of Milton's interest in theatre and drama.