The Elizabethan Dumb Show (Routledge Revivals)
The Elizabethan Dumb Show (Routledge Revivals)

Author: Dieter Mehl

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1136832300

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First published in English in 1965, this book discusses the roots and development of the dumb show as a device in Elizabethan drama. The work provides not only a useful manual for those who wish to check the occurrence of dumb shows and the uses to which they are put; it also makes a real contribution to a better understanding of the progress of Elizabethan drama, and sheds new light on some of the lesser known plays of the period.

The Iconography of the English History Play
The Iconography of the English History Play

Author: Martha Hester Fleischer

Publisher:

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13:

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This study investigates the emblematic significance of the stage imagery of the popular English play in the age of Shakespeare. This venture into iconography aims to demonstrate that these plays convey significance by means of visual conventions and commonplaces, and that the nonverbal images so employed actually constitute a visual vocabulary currant at least in this dramatic genre. Drama is one of the visual arts, and in production the action creates a series of visual impressions which include non-verbal, presentational, and stage images. Many stage images are stage emblems, which carry culturally agreed upon moral meanings -- representations that carry allusions and allegories, part of the language of picture.

A Narratology of Drama
A Narratology of Drama

Author: Christine Schwanecke

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-01-19

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 3110724146

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This volume argues against Gérard Genette’s theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

The Viola d’Amore
The Viola d’Amore

Author: Rachael Durkin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-23

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0429783655

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This book provides the first scholarly history of the viola d’amore, a popular bowed string instrument of the Baroque era, with a unique tone produced by a set of metal sympathetic strings. Composers like Bach made use of the viola d’amore for its particular sound, but the instrument subsequently fell out of fashion amid orchestral standardisation, only to see a revival as interest in early music and historical performance grew. Drawing on literary accounts, iconography, and surviving instruments, this study examines the origins and development of this eye-catching string instrument in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores the rich variation of designs displayed in extant viola d’amore specimens, both as originally constructed and as a result of conversion and repair. The viola d’amore is then set into the wider context of Elizabethan England’s development of instruments with wire strings, and its legacy in the form of the baryton which emerged in the early seventeenth century, followed by a look at the viola d’amore’s own nomenclatorial and organological influence. The book closes with a discussion of the viola d’amore’s revival, and its use and manufacture today. Offering insights for organological research and historical performance practice, this study enhances our knowledge of both the viola d’amore and its wider family of instruments.

Reading Robert Greene
Reading Robert Greene

Author: Darren Freebury-Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-06-15

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1000594564

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Robert Greene holds a significant place in our understanding of Elizabethan literature. This book offers the most rigorous attempt yet undertaken to determine the scope of the playwright’s canon through analyses of Greene’s verse style, vocabulary, rhyming habits, and the dramatist’s phraseology in his attested plays and in comparison to four plays that have long been on the margins of Greene’s corpus: Locrine, Selimus, George a Greene, and A Knack to Know a Knave. The book defines the ranges for Greene’s stylistic habits for the very first time and proceeds to identify parallels of thought, language, and overall dramaturgy that reveal a single author’s creative consciousness. This volume also casts light on Greene as a more collaborative dramatist than has hitherto been acknowledged. Through emphasizing the immediate surroundings in which Greene was writing – the flourishing of popular theatres in two compact areas of London, in which each theatre company and their dra-matists kept a close eye on what their competitors were producing – Greene emerges as an influential playwright, whose restored oeuvre enables us to establish new ways in which his dramatic methods impacted other writers of the period, including Shakespeare.