Usually recognised as the first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) has become a popular subject for academic study.The study considers the ways in which Behn constructed her plays and used their staging to ensure the perceptions and apprehensions she wanted from that audience. It considers the ways in which her use of the scenic stage developed from contemporary staging, acting styles, and changing stage conventions and how she used these to contribute to the reception and understanding of her plays by the audience. The audience's reactions to events on stage are as much part of the theatrical experience as the dialogue and actions of the players, and are based on their implicit understanding of the relationship of their own life experiences to those shown on stage. In almost all her plays Aphra Behn was showing the restoration audience their own lives and behaviour writ large.
Restoration Staging 1660–74 cuts through prevalent ideas of Restoration theatre and drama to read early plays in their original theatrical contexts. Tim Keenan argues that Restoration play texts contain far more information about their own performance than previously imagined. Focusing on specific productions and physical staging at the three theatres operating in the first years of the Restoration – Vere Street, Bridges Street and Lincoln’s Inn Fields – Keenan analyses stage directions, scene headings and other performance clues embedded in the play-texts themselves. These close readings shed new light on staging practices of the period, building a radical new model of early Restoration staging. Restoration Staging, 1660–74 takes account of all extant new plays written for or premiered at three of London’s early theatres, presenting a much-needed reassessment of early Restoration drama.
Kate Aughterson provides readers with an approachable and fascinating critical guide to the dramatic works of an important seventeenth-century woman writer. Aughterson analyses Aphra Behn's abilities as a playwright, showing particularly how she skillfully employs comic and dramatic conventions to radical ends, and how she forces her audience to engage with issues about gender and sexuality whilst retaining her witty and accessible style. Chapters in the first part of the book provide close readings of the comedies, addressing such topics as openings, endings, character types, staging, and politics and society. In the second part, Aughterson not only examines Behn's literary career and the Restoration contexts of her plays, but also looks at some sample criticism and explores Behn's drama as performance.
Delving into the interaction between satire and more serious forms of literature, Shane Herron overturns long-standing assumptions around genre and style to explore how eighteenth-century writers in fact used irony to deepen the serious content of popular fiction and, conversely, used earnestness to sharpen their satirical bite.
This book examines why, when, how and where the scenic stage began in England. Little has been written about the development of theatrical scenery and how it was used in England in the seventeenth century, and what is known about the response to this innovation is fragmentary and uncertain. Unlike in Italy and France where scenery had been in use since the sixteenth century, the general public in England did not see plays presented against a painted location until Sir William Davenant presented The Siege of Rhodes at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1661. Painted landscapes or seascapes, perspective views of cities or palaces, lighting effects, gods or goddesses flying down on to the stage in a chariot, all these had only been seen before on the masque stage at court or in the occasional private play performance. This study argues that Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) was involved almost from the beginning of the process and that his influence continued after his death; that, although painted scenery as such would undoubtedly have appeared on the public stage after 1660, it would not have been in the same way, for Davenant made particular positive contributions which brought about certain changes in both the presentation and reception of plays which would not have happened as they did without his work and influence. This is new work which uses dramaturgical and scenographical analysis of selected plays and masques, against known theatrical history, to discover how the staging of painted settings was organised from c1605 to c1700. This kind of investigation into the links between masque staging and the staging of plays has not been done in quite this way before. The study begins with Davenant's involvement with Inigo Jones and John Webb. It analyses the staging of the court masques and discusses what Davenant took from this and how he used the information. It suggests that the move towards verisimilitude in the drama on the scenic stage was due in part to Davenant's imaginative use of certain of the physical components of masque staging in presentations by the Duke's Company. It argues that he encouraged dramatists to integrate the scenery into their plots, particularly to provide for disclosures and discoveries, in ways not possible before. How, in so doing, he implicitly changed the stage conventions of time and place which audiences had accepted from the platform stage. It also argues that the parallel development of operatic spectacle derived mainly from the use by Killgrew and the King's Company of the techniques for engineering the spectacular effects of the transformation scenes of the masque stage to embellish the heroic drama by Dryden and others. It suggests that the two staging methods combined in the later seventeenth century to give more sophisticated ways of using the scenery and thus involved the scenic stage with the dialogue and the action in all genres, but that such experimentation ended when financial and commercial considerations made it no longer viable. Nevertheless it concludes that, by the eighteenth century, theatre practitioners had learnt to use the stage craft and mechanical techniques of the masque stage to integrate the visual with the aural aspects of a production, and that dramatists, once concerned solely with the aural expression of their theme, had become playwrights who allowed for the visual elements in their texts. Over fifty illustrations exemplify the discussion. This is an important book in the history of theatre, essential background for the staging of the court masque, and for the scenography of the Restoration theatre.
This rich and varied portrait of the drama from 1660 to 1714 provides students with essential information about playwrights, staging and genres, situating them in the social and political culture of the time. No longer seen as a privileged arena for select dramatists and elite courtiers, the Restoration theatre is revealed in all of its tumult, energy and conflict. The fourteen newly-commissioned essays examine the theatre, paying attention to major playwrights such as Dryden, Wycherly and Congreve and also to more minor works and to plays by the first professional female dramatists. The book begins with chapters on the performance of the drama in its own time, on theatres, acting and staging, and continues with the main dramatic genres and themes, with a final chapter on the critical history of the drama. The volume also includes a thorough chronology and biographies and bibliographies of dramatists.
This well-organized and accessible text provides a glimpse into the English life and culture, starting from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. As the English life and culture are inextricably interwoven with English literature and its myriad aspects, this study becomes so significant and useful for the students of English literature. The text begins with a description of English life and culture from the Medieval period to the Renaissance. The author gives a masterly analysis of such subjects as Feudalism, Medieval Drama and literature, the Renaissance, the Reformation and most significantly, the Elizabethan Theatre. Then the text goes on to describe in detail about the Restoration Period and the Age of Reason. Besides, the book gives a wealth of information on important topics like Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Victorianism and Victorian literature. The text concludes with a chapter that deals on Modernism, Literature and Culture in the Postmodern World, and Aspects of Contemporary Culture and Society. What distinguishes the text is the provision of a Glossary at the end of each chapter, which gives not only the meaning and definition of the terms but also provides the entire cultural background and the history that these terms are associated with. Students of English literature-both undergraduate honours and postgraduate students-will find this book highly informative, enlightening, and refreshing in its style. In addition, all those who have an abiding interest in English life and culture will find reading this text a stimulating and rewarding experience.
