This is an annual publication devoted to understanding the drama as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The interdisciplinary essays explore the relationship of Renaissance dramatic traditions to their precursors and successors, and examine the impact of different forms of interpretation.

Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. Volume 41 features articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

By examining representations of women on stage and in the many printed materials aimed at them, Karen Newman shows how female subjectivity—both the construction of the gendered subject and the ideology of women's subjection to men—was fashioned in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Her emphasis is not on "women" so much as on the category of "femininity" as deployed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through the critical lens of poststructuralism, Newman reads anatomies, conduct and domesticity handbooks, sermons, homilies, ballads, and court cases to delineate the ideologies of femininity they represented and produced. Arguing that drama, as spectacle, provides a peculiarly useful locus for analyzing the management of femininity, Newman considers the culture of early modern London to reveal how female subjectivity was fashioned and staged in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and others.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Publisher description

The book considers the London theatrical culture which took shape in the 1570s and came to an end in 1642. Places emphasis on those plays that are readily available in modern editions and can sometimes to be seen in modern productions, including Shakespeare. Provides students with the historical, literary and theatrical contexts they need to make sense of Renaissance drama. Includes a series of short biographies of playwrights during this period. Features close analyses of more than 20 plays, each of which draws attention to what makes a particular play interesting and identifies relevant critical questions. Examines early modern drama in terms of its characteristic actions, such as cuckolding, flattering, swaggering, going mad, and rising from the dead.

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