Unfixable Forms

Unfixable Forms

Author: Katherine Schaap Williams

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1501753525

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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.


Unsettled Toleration

Unsettled Toleration

Author: Brian Walsh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0191081868

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Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage historicizes and scrutinizes the unstable concept of toleration as it emerges in drama performed on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. Brian Walsh examines plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that represent intra-Christian conflict between mainstream believers and various minorities, analyzing the sometimes explicit, sometimes indirect, occasionally smooth, but more often halting and equivocal forms of dealing with difference that these plays imagine can result from such exchanges. Through innovative and in some cases unprecedented readings of a diverse collection of plays, from Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth, Middleton's The Puritan Widow, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Pericles, and Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me, Walsh shows how the English stage in the first decade of the seventeenth century, as a social barometer, registered the basic condition of religious "unsettlement " of the post-Reformation era; and concurrently that the stage, as a social incubator, brooded over imagined scenarios of confessional conflict that could end variously in irresolution, accommodation, or even religious syncretism. It thus helped to create, sustain and enlarge an open-ended public conversation on the vicissitudes of getting along in a sectarian world. Attending to this conversation is vital to our present understanding of the state of religious toleration the early modern period, for it gives a fuller picture of the ways religious difference was experienced than the limited and inert pronouncements on the topic that officials of the church and state offered.


George Chapman

George Chapman

Author: Vincent W. Beach

Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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Poet, dramatist, and translator, George Chapman (1559-1643) was a contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson as well as a collaborator of Inigo Jones. Chapman is best known for his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and for the tragedy Bussy D'Ambois. This annotated guide to Chapman scholarship examines individual works in the major genres in which Chapman was active and covers: poems; translations; comedies; tragedies/histories; and includes a section on general studies covering biographies, documents and letters, and other reference works. This volume should be a useful resource for students of Renaissance and Jacobean literature and drama.