A Short History of English Renaissance Drama
A Short History of English Renaissance Drama

Author: Helen Hackett

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2012-10-05

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0857723367

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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.

A Short History of the English Drama (Classic Reprint)
A Short History of the English Drama (Classic Reprint)

Author: Benjamin Brawley

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-12-16

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9780332970653

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Excerpt from A Short History of the English Drama This book makes no special effort to be either original or profound. It aims simply to set forth in brief compass the main facts that one might wish to have at hand in his first course in the English Drama. The great revival of interest in this subject within recent years has produced many noteworthy studies, especially in the literature of the age of Elizabeth; but, singularly enough, most of the books that have been written have been for those who already knew most about the subject. The present work pre supposes only that the student has had an elementary col lege course in the history of English Literature, and with just so much as a basis it endeavors to assist him as he passes on to the study of the greatest of the forms that this literature has so far assumed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.