A study of the practices and politics of early modern publishers of plays.

Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe moves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates ‘medieval’ from ‘early modern’ drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany. This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri (visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheater from the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic, and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.

Harry Berger, Jr., has long been one of our most revered and respected literary and cultural critics. Since the late nineties, a stream of remarkable and innovative publications have shown how very broad his interests are, moving from Shakespeare to baroque painting, to Plato, to theories of early culture. In this volume a distinguished group of scholars gathers to celebrate the work of Harry Berger, Jr. To "celebrate," in Berger's words, is "to visit something either in great numbers or else frequently-to go away and come back, go away and come back, go away and come back. Celebrating is what you do the second or third time around, but not the first. To celebrate is to revisit. To revisit is to revise. Celebration is the eureka of revision." Not only former students but distinguished colleagues and scholars come together in these pages to discover Berger's eurekas-to revisit the rigor and originality of his criticism, and occasionally to revise its conclusions, all through the joy of strenuous engagement. Nineteen essays on Berger's Shakespeare, his Spenser, his Plato, and his Rembrandt, on his theories of interpretation and cultural change and on the ethos of his critical and pedagogical styles, open new approaches to the astonishing ongoing body of work authored by Berger. An introduction by the editors and an afterword by Berger himself place this festival of interpretation in the context of Berger's intellectual development and the reception of his work from the mid-twentieth century into the first decade of the twenty-first.

Through short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book provides the first ever history of the canon of Renaissance drama.

In this major reassessment of his subject, Richard Rowland restores Thomas Heywood-playwright, miscellanist and translator-to his rightful place in early modern theatre history. Rowland contextualizes and historicizes this important contemporary of Shakespeare, locating him on the geographic and cultural map of London through the business Heywood conducts in his writing. Arguing that Heywood's theatrical output deserves the same attention and study that has been directed towards Shakespeare, Jonson, and more recently Middleton, this book looks at three periods of Heywood's creativity: the end of the Elizabethan era and the beginning of the Jacobean, the mid 1620s, and the mid to late 1630s. By locating the works of those years precisely in the political and cultural conflicts to which they respond, Rowland initiates a major reassessment of the remarkable achievements of this playwright. Rowland also pays attention to Heywood in performance, seeing this writer as a jobbing playwright working in an industry that depended on making writing work. Finally, the author explores how Heywood participated in the civic life of London in his writings beyond the playhouse. Here Rowland examines pamphlets, translations, and the sequence of lord mayor's pageants that Heywood produced as the political crisis deepened. Offering close readings of Heywood that establish the range, quality and theatrical significance of the writing, Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599-1639 fits a fascinating piece into the emerging picture of the 'complete' early modern English theatre.

The purpose of this book is to honor the scholarly legacy of Charles R. Forker with a series of essays that address the problem of literary influence in original ways and from a variety of perspectives. The emphasis throughout is on the sort of careful, exhaustive, evidence-based scholarship to which Forker dedicated his entire professional life. Although wide-ranging and various by design, the essays in this book never lose sight of three discrete yet overlapping areas of literary inquiry that create a unity of perspective amid the diversity of approaches: 1) the formation of play texts, textual analysis, and editorial practice; 2) performance history and the material playing conditions from Shakespeare’s time to the present, including film as well as stage representations; and 3) the world, both cultural and literary, in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked and to which they bequeathed an artistic legacy that continues to be re-interpreted and re-defined by a whole new set of cultural and literary pressures. Eschewing any single, predetermined ideological perspective, the essays in this book call our attention to how the simplest questions or observations can open up provocative and unexpected scholarly vistas. In so doing, they invite us into a subtly re-configured world of literary influence that draws us into new, often unexpected, ways of seeing and understanding the familiar.

Shakespeare and Moral Agency presents a collection of new essays by literary scholars and philosophers considering character and action in Shakespeare's plays as heuristic models for the exploration of some salient problems in the field of moral inquiry. Together they offer a unified presentation of an emerging orientation in Shakespeare studies, drawing on recent work in ethics, philosophy of mind, and analytic aesthetics to construct a powerful framework for the critical analysis of Shakespeare's works. Contributors suggest new possibilities for the interpretation of Shakespearean drama by engaging with the rich body of contemporary work in the field of moral philosophy, offering significant insights for literary criticism, for pedagogy, and also for theatrical performance.