Contributors to this collection argue for the importance of academic drama as a site of cultural production in England from 1500 to 1700. They explore how these plays address various aspects of culture, including the relationship between the academy and the state, the tensions between humanism and religious reform, the social profits and economic liabilities of formal education, and the increasing involvement of universities in the commercial market, among other issues.
This volume explores the transnationality and interculturality of early modern performance in multiple languages, cultures, countries and genres. Its twelve essays compose a complex image of theatre connections as a socially, economically, politically and culturally rich tissue of networks and influences. With particular attention to itinerant performers, court festival, and the Black, Muslim and Jewish impact, they combine disciplines and methods to place Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the wider context of performance culture in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Czech and Italian speaking Europe. The authors examine transnational connections by offering multidisciplinary perspectives on the theatrical significance of concrete historical facts: archaeological findings, archival records, visual artefacts, and textual evidence.
Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.
Each of these essays addresses not only a play, but a specific cultural or literary topic. They cover vital perspectives in cultural studies such as race, class, gender, sexuality and colonialism; as well as topics in history like humanism, science, law, and reformation theology; and in dramatic genre.
This is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama during the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical worlds of Englands universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Drama at the Universities opens up an exciting and challenging body of evidence and offers the reader a choice of three inroads into the corpus: institutions, intertexts, and individuals. How to get noticed at university? How to get into university in the first place, or a job afterwards? Sandis pinpoints the skills that were required for success and the role of playwriting and performance in the development of those skills. We follow Oxford and Cambridge students along their educational journeyfrom schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace. For the first time, we see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it was: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and self-reflexive. It was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked, and proved themselves to the community. Therefore, this study argues, to understand university drama as a whole we must recreate it from the building blocks of individual college histories. The hundreds of plays that we have inherited from Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in Classical culture; many are written in Latin. Manuscript, not print, was the accepted medium for keeping records of student plays, and these handwritten copies were unique and personal. It is time to recognize these plays in the context of early modern English drama, to uncover the culture of drama at the universities where many leading playwrights of the age were trained.
This is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama during the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical worlds of England's universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Drama at the Universities opens up an exciting and challenging body of evidence and offers the reader a choice of three inroads into the corpus: institutions, intertexts, and individuals. How to get noticed at university? How to get into university in the first place, or a job afterwards? Sandis pinpoints the skills that were required for success and the role of playwriting and performance in the development of those skills. We follow Oxford and Cambridge students along their educational journey--from schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace. For the first time, we see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it was: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and self-reflexive. It was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked, and proved themselves to the community. Therefore, this study argues, to understand university drama as a whole we must recreate it from the building blocks of individual college histories. The hundreds of plays that we have inherited from Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in Classical culture; many are written in Latin. Manuscript, not print, was the accepted medium for keeping records of student plays, and these handwritten copies were unique and personal. It is time to recognize these plays in the context of early modern English drama, to uncover the culture of drama at the universities where many leading playwrights of the age were trained.
Early Modern Drama in Performance is a collection of essays in honor of Lois Potter, the distinguished author of five monographs, including most recently The Life of William Shakespeare (2012), and numerous articles, edited collections, and editions. This collection’s emphasis on Shakespearean and early modern drama reflects the area for which Potter is most widely known, as a performance critic, editor, and literary scholar. The essays by a diverse group of scholars who have been influenced by Potter address recurring themes in her work: Shakespeare and non-Shakespearean early modern drama, performance history and theatre practice, theatrical performance across cultures, play reviewing, and playreading. What unifies them most, though, is that they carry on the spirit of Potter’s work: her ability to meet a text, a performance, or a historical period on its own terms, to give scrupulous attention to specific details and elegantly show how these details generate larger meaning, and to recover and preserve the fleeting and the ephemeral.
