Boy Actors in Early Modern England

Boy Actors in Early Modern England

Author: Harry R. McCarthy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-09

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1009098950

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This innovative study draws on theatre history and present-day performance to re-appraise the remarkable skills of early modern boy actors.


Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

Author: Edel Lamb

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-11-13

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0230594735

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This book investigates how the Children of Paul's (1599-1606) and the Children of the Queen's Revels (1600-13) defined their players as children and, via an analysis of their plays and theatrical practices, it examines early modern theatre as a site in which children have the opportunity to articulate their emerging selfhoods.


Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Author: S. P. Cerasano

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 168393430X

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Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an annual volume committed to the publication of essays and reviews related to English drama and theater history to 1642. An internationally recognized board of scholars oversees the publication of MaRDiE. Readers who wish to deepen their understanding of early drama will find that the journal publishes wide-ranging discussions not only of plays and early performance history, but of topics pertaining to cultural history, as well as manuscript studies and the history of printing.


Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature

Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Simone Chess

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-14

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1317360850

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This volume examines and theorizes the oft-ignored phenomenon of male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing in early modern drama, prose, and poetry, inviting MTF crossdressing episodes to take a fuller place alongside instances of female-to-male crossdressing and boy actors’ crossdressing, which have long held the spotlight in early modern gender studies. The author argues that MTF crossdressing episodes are especially rich sources for socially-oriented readings of queer gender—that crossdressers’ genders are constructed and represented in relation to romantic partners, communities, and broader social structures like marriage, economy, and sexuality. Further, she argues that these relational representations show that the crossdresser and his/her allies often benefit financially, socially, and erotically from his/her queer gender presentation, a corrective to the dominant idea that queer gender has always been associated with shame, containment, and correction. By attending to these relational and beneficial representations of MTF crossdressers in early modern literature, the volume helps to make a larger space for queer, genderqueer, male-bodied and queer-feminine representations in our conversations about early modern gender and sexuality.


Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

Author: Asuka Kimura

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-01-30

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1501513893

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The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.


Straight Acting

Straight Acting

Author: Will Tosh

Publisher: Seal Press

Published: 2024-09-17

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1541602684

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A dazzling and "highly readable" (Guardian) portrait of Shakespeare as a young artist, revealing how his rich and complex queer life informed the plays and poems we treasure today “Was Shakespeare gay?” For years the question has sent experts and fans into a tailspin of confusion. But as scholar Will Tosh argues, this debate misses the point: sex, intimacy, and identity in Elizabethan England were infinitely more complex—and queer—than we have been taught. In this incisive biography, Tosh reveals William Shakespeare as a queer artist who drew on his society’s nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality to create some of English literature’s richest works. During Shakespeare’s time, same-sex desire was repressed and punished by the Church and state, but it was also articulated and sustained by institutions across England. Moving through the queer spaces of Shakespeare’s life—his Stratford schoolroom, smoky London taverns and playhouses, the royal court—Tosh shows how strongly Shakespeare’s early work was influenced by the queer culture of the time, much of it totally integrated into mainstream society. He also uncovers the surprising reason why Shakespeare veered away from his early work’s gender-bending homoeroticism. Offering a subversive sketch of Elizabethan England, Straight Acting uncovers Shakespeare as one of history’s great queer artists and completely reshapes the way we understand his life and times.


Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader

Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader

Author: Peter Kirwan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1350270199

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One of the earliest domestic tragedies, Arden of Faversham is a powerful Elizabethan drama based on the real-life murder of Thomas Arden. This Critical Reader presents the first collection of essays specifically focused upon Arden of Faversham. It highlights the way in which this important play from the early 1590s stands at several different critical intersections. Focused research chapters propose new directions for exploring the play in the light of ecocriticism, genre studies, critical race studies and narratives of dispossession. It also looks forward to Arden of Faversham's role and status in a less author-centred critical climate. Chapters explore how this anonymous and canonically marginal play has been approached in the past by scholars and theatre-makers and the frameworks that have offered productive insight into its unique features. The volume includes chapters covering a wide range of critical discourses and resources available for its study, as well as offering practical approaches to the play in the classroom.


The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624–2024

The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624–2024

Author: William David Green

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-02

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1040010326

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This volume celebrates Thomas Middleton’s legacy as a dramatist, marking the 400th anniversary of Middleton’s final and most contentious work for the public theatres, A Game at Chess (1624). The collection is divided into three sections: ‘Critical and Textual Reception’, ‘Afterlives and Legacies’, and ‘Practice and Performance’. This division reflects the book’s holistic approach to Middleton’s canon, and its emphasis on the continuing significance of Middleton’s writing to the study of early modern English drama. Each section offers an assessment of the place of Middleton’s drama in culture, criticism, and education today through a range of critical approaches. Featuring work from a range of voices (from early career, independent, and seasoned academics and practitioners), the collection will be appropriate for both specialists in early modern literature and drama who are interested in both theory and practice, and students or scholars researching Middleton’s historical significance to the study of early theatre.


Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England

Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England

Author: Claire M. L. Bourne

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-06-05

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0192588524

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Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality—from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)—intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these experiments into a uniquely dramatic typography that was constantly responsive to performance effects made it possible for 'plays' to be marketed, collected, and read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a print genre distinct from all other genres of imaginative writing. It has been said, 'If a play is a book, it is not a play.' Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England shows that 'play' and 'book' were, in fact, mutually constitutive: it was the very bookishness of plays printed in early modern England that allowed them to be recognized by their earliest readers as plays in the first place.