Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642
Title | Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642 PDF eBook |
Author | J. Low |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 219 |
Release | 2011-04-25 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 0230118399 |
This essay collection builds on the latest research on the topic of theatre audiences in early modern England. In broad terms, the project answers the question, 'How do we define the relationships between performance and audience?'.
Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642
Title | Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642 PDF eBook |
Author | J. Low |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 400 |
Release | 2011-04-25 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 0230118399 |
This essay collection builds on the latest research on the topic of theatre audiences in early modern England. In broad terms, the project answers the question, 'How do we define the relationships between performance and audience?'.
The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576–1642
Title | The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576–1642 PDF eBook |
Author | Julie Sanders |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 283 |
Release | 2014-02-20 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1107729084 |
Engaging and stimulating, this Introduction provides a fresh vista of the early modern theatrical landscape. Chapters are arranged according to key genres (tragedy, revenge, satire, history play, pastoral and city comedy), punctuated by a series of focused case studies on topics ranging from repertoire to performance style, political events to the physical body of the actor, and from plays in print to the space of the playhouse. Julie Sanders encourages readers to engage with particular dramatic moments, such as opening scenes, skulls on stage or the conventions of disguise, and to apply the materials and methods contained in the book in inventive ways. A timeline and frequent cross-references provide continuity. Always alert to the possibilities of performance, Sanders reveals the remarkable story of early modern drama not through individual writers, but through repertoires and company practices, helping to relocate and re-imagine canonical plays and playwrights.
Globalizing Fortune on The Early Modern Stage
Title | Globalizing Fortune on The Early Modern Stage PDF eBook |
Author | Jane Hwang Degenhardt |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 257 |
Release | 2022-07-28 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0192638173 |
How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about the all-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency? Globalizing Fortune addresses these questions by demonstrating how English economic expansion and global transformation produced a new philosophy of fortune oriented around discerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities. The popular theater played an influential role in dramatizing the new prospects and dangers opened up by nascent global economics and fostering a set of ethical practices for engaging with fortunes unpredictable turns. While largely derided as a sinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune made a comeback on the English Renaissance stage as a force associated with valiant risks, ennobling adventures, and purposeful action. The early modern stage also reveals how a new philosophy of fortune led to economic exploitation and racialized exclusions. Offering in-depth discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the history of the English commercial theaterlike that of English seaborne expansionwas also a history of fortune. The public theater not only shaped popular understandings of fortunes role in a culture undergoing economic transformation, but also addressed this transformation from a unique position because of its own implication in London commerce, its reliance on paying customers, and its vulnerability to the risks and contingencies of live performance. Drawing attention to an archive of plays dramatizing maritime travel, trade, and adventure, this book shows how the popular stage shaped evolving understandings of fortune by cultivating new viewing practices and mechanisms of theatrical wonder, as well as modeling proper ways of acting in the face of unknown outcomes and contingency. In short, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the public theater offered the first modern understanding of fortune as a globalizing commercial and ethical phenomenon.
Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625
Title | Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603–1625 PDF eBook |
Author | Simon Smith |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 263 |
Release | 2017-09-07 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1316851818 |
Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.
Dramatic Geography
Title | Dramatic Geography PDF eBook |
Author | Laurence Publicover |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 219 |
Release | 2017 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 0198806817 |
Focusing on early modern plays which stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, the volume explores the ways in which early modern plays stage dramatic geography and how this has shaped literary and theatrical heritage.
Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England
Title | Listening for Theatrical Form in Early Modern England PDF eBook |
Author | Deutermann Allison Deutermann |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
Pages | 208 |
Release | 2016-05-31 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 1474411274 |
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