Nowhere is the richness and variety of the English Renaissance better shown than in the dramatic works of the period which combined to an unusual degree the arts of poetry, music, acting, and dance. This collection of essays by a number of distinguished scholars offers a series of views of the music of this drama -- ranging from the mystery cycles still performed in the late sixteenth century to the cavalier drama of the early seventeenth. The essays included here are mainly concerned with the minor dramatic forms -- the mystery plays, the "entertainments," the masques, and the works of such playwrights as Marston and Cartwright -- which reveal more extensively the blending of music and drama; and they illustrate a variety of approaches to the dramatic art. The collection as a whole demonstrates the need for an interdisciplinary consideration of this important area of study. Of especial value to musicologists is the bibliography of extant music used in dramatic works of the period.

This book offers a survey of how female and male characters in English Renaissance theatre participated and interacted in musical activities, both inside and outside the contemporary societal decorum. Wong’s analysis broadens our understanding of the general theatrical representation of music, or musical dramaturgy, and complicates the current discussion of musical portrayal and construction of gender during this period. Wong discusses dramaturgical meanings of music and its association with gender, love, and erotomania in Renaissance plays. The negotiation between the dichotomous qualities of the heavenly and the demonic finds extensive application in recent studies of music in early modern English plays. However, while ideological dualities identified in music in traditional Renaissance thinking may seem unequivocal, various musical representations of characters and situations in early modern drama would prove otherwise. Wong, building upon the conventional model of binarism, explores how playwrights created their musical characters and scenarios according to the received cultural use and perception of music, and, at the same time, experimented with the multivalent meanings and significance embodied in theatrical music.

Nowhere is the richness and variety of the English Renaissance better shown than in the dramatic works of the period which combined to an unusual degree the arts of poetry, music, acting, and dance. This collection of essays by a number of distinguished scholars offers a series of views of the music of this drama—ranging from the mystery cycles still performed in the late sixteenth century to the cavalier drama of the early seventeenth. The essays included here are mainly concerned with the minor dramatic forms—the mystery plays, the "entertainments," the masques, and the works of such playwrights as Marston and Cartwright—which reveal more extensively the blending of music and drama; and they illustrate a variety of approaches to the dramatic art. The collection as a whole demonstrates the need for an interdisciplinary consideration of this important area of study. Of especial value to musicologists is the bibliography of extant music used in dramatic works of the period.

Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.

Publisher description

The first book to systematically analyze the role the performing arts played in English schools after the Reformation.