The English Stage

The English Stage
Author: J. L. Styan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1996-07-13
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521556361

The English Stage tells the story of drama through its many changes in style and convention from medieval times to the present day. With a wide sweep of coverage, John Styan analyses the key features of staging, including early street theatre and public performance, the evolution of the playhouse and the private space, and the pairing of theory and stagecraft in the works of modern dramatists. He focuses on the conventions by which a playwright, actors and their audience create the phenomenon of theatre and the way such conventions have changed over time. Styan can be considered among a small number of influential scholars who have helped to develop theatre history from its origins in literary studies into an independent and respected field. From the vantage point of a lifetime's study he examines and illustrates the multitude of factors which have brought and continue to bring plays to life.

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage
Author: Andrew Bozio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019258572X

Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this, first, by establishing how characters think through their surroundings — not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations, but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorise and thematise the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as The Malcontent, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine, King Lear, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Bartholomew Fair, this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how, in doing so, theatre altered the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and imagined place in early modern England.

Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage

Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage
Author: Professor Peter Hyland
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1409478777

Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays, and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study Peter Hyland considers a range of practical issues related to the performance of disguise. He goes on to examine various conceptual issues that provide a background to theatrical disguise (the relation of self and "other", the meaning of mask and performance). He looks at many disguise plays under three broad headings. He considers moral issues (the almost universal association of disguise with "evil"); social issues (sumptuary legislation, clothing, and the theatre, and constructions of class, gender and national or racial identity); and aesthetic issues (disguise as an emblem of theatre, and the significance of disguise for the dramatic artist). The study serves to examine the significant ways in which disguise devices have been used in early modern drama in England.

Magic on the Early English Stage

Magic on the Early English Stage
Author: Philip Butterworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2005-10-06
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521825139

An original investigation into conjuring tricks and stage magic on the medieval stage.

The Place of the Stage

The Place of the Stage
Author: Steven Mullaney
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780472083466

Probes English society in the age of Shakespeare