The essays in this collection, contributed by an internationally distinguished group of scholars, bring up to date many aspects of the criticism of the English Interludes. The development of these plays was a significant part of the history of the growth of English drama in the sixteenth century to the extent that they may be regarded as its main stream. Arising by means of a felicitous combination of the development of printing and the growth of a professional theatre, plays of this type quickly became a forum for the presentation and exploration of many contemporary themes. They became a useful means of disseminating a wide variety of opinions and public concerns as well as exhibiting at times the intellectual brilliance of the Renaissance.The essays here are concentrated upon power, particularly in its religious and political aspects, gender and theatricality. The political and religious upheavals of the Reformation under the Tudor monarchy form a background as well as a focus at times. In particular the position of women in sixteenth-century society is examined in essays on several plays. There is also discussion of the development of theatrical techniques as playwrights worked closely with small acting companies to reach a wide audience ranging from the royal court to the common streets. This was achieved, as a number of essays make clear, through a variety of entertaining theatrical devices.ContentsPeter HAPPE: IntroductionJean-Paul DEBAX: Complicity and Hierarchy: A Tentative Definition of the Interlude GenusLynn FOREST-HILL: Maidens and Matrons: The Theatricality of Gender in the Tudor InterludesPeter HAPPE: Skelton's Magnyfycence: Theatre, Poetry, InfluenceMike PINCOMBE: Comic Treatment of Tragic Character in Godly Queen Hester Janette DILLON: Powerful Obedience: Godly Queen Hester and Katherine of AragonBob GODFREY: Feminine Singularity: The Representation of Young Women in Some Early Tudor InterludesDavid MILLS: Wit to Woo: The Wit InterludesDermot CAVANAGH: Reforming Sovereignty: John Bale and Tragic DramaGreg WALKER: Flytyng in the Face of Convention: Protest and Innovation in Lindsay's Satyre of the Thrie EstaitisJohn J. MCGAVIN: Working Towards a Reformed Identity in Lindsay's Satyre of the Thrie EstaitisPaul Whitfield WHITE: The Pammachius Affair at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1545Roberta MULLINI: Impatient Poverty: The Intertextual Game of SatirePeter THOMSON: Sound City Jests and Country Pretty Jests: Jack Juggler and Gammer Gurton's NeedleAlice HUNT: Legitimacy, Ceremony and Drama: Mary Tudor's Coronation and RespublicaDavid BEVINGTON: Staging the Reformation: Power and Theatricality in the Plays of William Wager

​This book is a study of the representation of the Persian empire in English drama across the early modern period, from the 1530s to the 1690s. The wide focus of this book, encompassing thirteen dramatic entertainments, both canonical and little-known, allow it to trace the changes and developments in the dramatic use of Persia and its people across one and a half centuries. It explores what Persia signified to English playwrights and audiences in this period; the ideas and associations conjured up by mention of ‘Persia’; and where information about Persia came from. It also considers how ideas about Persia changed with the development of global travel and trade, as English people came into people with Persians for the first time. In addressing these issues, this book provides an examination not only of the representation of Persia in dramatic material, but of the broader relationship between travel, politics and the theatre in early modern England.

10 Isabel Farnese and the Sexual Politics of the Spanish Court Theater -- Index

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended ‘irrationality’ entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others’ perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools? Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools’ characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.

The study of early drama has undergone a quiet revolution in the last four decades, radically altering critical approaches to form, genre, and canon. Drawing on disciplines from art history to musicology and reception studies, The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance reconsiders early "drama" as a mixed mode entertainment best studied not only alongside non-dramatic texts, but also other modes of performance. From performance before the playhouse to the afterlife of medieval drama in the contemporary avant-garde, this stunning collection of essays is divided into four sections: Northern European Playing before the Playhouse; Modes of Production and Reception; Reviewing the Anglophone Tradition; The Long Middle Ages Offering a much needed reassessment of what is generally understood as "English medieval drama", The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance provides an invaluable resource for both students and scholars of medieval studies.

The Early Modern World, 1450-1750: Seeds of Modernity takes a distinctive approach to global history and enables a holistic view of the world during this period,without prioritizing any one nation or region. It guides students towards an understanding of how different empires, nations, communities and individuals constructed, contested and were touched by major trends and events. Its thematic structure covers politics, technology, economics, the environment and intellectual and religious worldviews. In order to connect global trends and events to human experiences, each chapter is underpinned by a social and cultural history focus, enabling the reader to gain an understanding of the lived human experience and make sense of various perspectives and worldviews. The 'Legacy' feature also discusses connections between early modern history and the contemporary world, looking at how the past is contested or memorialized today. The result is a textbook that helps the 21st-century student gain a rich and nuanced understanding of the global history of the early modern period.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is Spain's most famous author, primarily because of his celebrated novel Don Quixote. His first love, however, was the theater, for which he wrote extensively. His Interludes, published 400 years ago in 1615, are short, comic plays that explore the underbelly of Renaissance Spanish society. Their characters include hillbillies and con artists, pimps and prostitutes, adulterous wives and jealous husbands, and an array of other comical figures. Cervantes's treatment of them is simultaneously critical and sympathetic. Although interludes tend to be works of light comedy, Cervantes often imbues his with deeper themes. Charles Patterson, a scholar of Hispanic theater, has created translations of the Interludes that are true to the earthiness of the originals but designed to be readily playable for today's actors and accessible to modern audiences. This book includes an introduction that places the plays in context, briefly describing the life of Cervantes, theater in early modern Spain, Cervantes's interludes, and Patterson's approach to translating them. Casual readers, theater and literature students, and professional actors alike will delight in these comedic gems that reveal a less familiar side of one of history's greatest writers.