Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Author: Sarah Lewis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-24

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1108901697

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This book analyses the cultural and theatrical intersections of early modern temporal concepts and gendered identities. Through close readings of the works of Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood and others, across the genres of domestic comedy, city comedy and revenge tragedy, Sarah Lewis shows how temporal tropes are used to delineate masculinity and femininity on the early modern stage, and vice versa. She sets out the ways in which the temporal constructs of patience, prodigality and revenge, as well as the dramatic identities that are built from those constructs, and the experience of playgoing itself, negotiate a fraught opposition between action in the moment and delay in the duration. This book argues that looking at time through the lens of gender, and gender through the lens of time, is crucial if we are to develop our understanding of the early modern cultural construction of both.


A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

Author: Michael Hattaway

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-02-12

Total Pages: 1264

ISBN-13: 9781444319026

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In this revised and greatly expanded edition of theCompanion, 80 scholars come together to offer an originaland far-reaching assessment of English Renaissance literature andculture. A new edition of the best-selling Companion to EnglishRenaissance Literature, revised and updated, with 22 newessays and 19 new illustrations Contributions from some 80 scholars including Judith H.Anderson, Patrick Collinson, Alison Findlay, Germaine Greer,Malcolm Jones, Arthur Kinney, James Knowles, Arthur Marotti, RobertMiola and Greg Walker Unrivalled in scope and its exploration of unfamiliar literaryand cultural territories the Companion offers new readingsof both ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’texts Features essays discussing material culture, sectarian writing,the history of the body, theatre both in and outside theplayhouses, law, gardens, and ecology in early modern England Orientates the beginning student, while providing advancedstudents and faculty with new directions for theirresearch All of the essays from the first edition, along with therecommendations for further reading, have been reworked orupdated


Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender

Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender

Author: Kate Chedgzoy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2000-12-05

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0230628265

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Over the last quarter-century, feminist criticism of Shakespeare has greatly expanded and enriched the range of interpretations of the Shakespearean texts, their original historical location, and subsequent reinterpretation. Characteristically it weaves between past and present, driven by a commitment both to intervene in contemporary cultural politics and to recover a fuller sense of the sexual politics of the literary heritage. Collecting together essays which offer detailed accounts of particular plays with others that take a broader overview of the field, this Casebook showcases the range of critical strategies used by feminist criticism, and illustrates how vital attention to the politics of gender and sexuality is to a full understanding and appreciation of Shakespearean drama.


Bodies and Their Spaces

Bodies and Their Spaces

Author: Russell West-Pavlov

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9042016884

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Bodies and their Spaces: System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre explores the emergence of the distinctively modern "gender system" at the close of the early modern period. The book investigates shifts in the gendered spaces assigned to men and women in the "public" and "private" domains and their changing modes of interconnection; in concert with these social spaces it examines the emergence of biologically based notions of sex and a novel sense of individual subjectivity. These parallel and linked transformations converged in the development of a new gender system which more efficiently enforced the requirements of patriarchy under the evolving economic conditions of merchant capitalism. These changes can be seen to be rehearsed, contested and debated in literary artefacts of the early modern period - in particular the drama. This book suggests that until the closure of the English theatres in 1642, the drama not only reflected but also exacerbated the turbulence surrounding gender configurations in transition in early modern society. The book reads a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts, and interprets them with the aid of the "systems theory" developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.


Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750

Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750

Author: M.A. Katritzky

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 1351871544

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Well illustrated, accessibly presented, and drawing on a comprehensive range of historical documents, including British, German and other European images, and literary as well as non-literary texts (many previously unconsidered in this context), this study offers the first interdisciplinary gendered assessment of early modern performing itinerant healers (mountebanks, charlatans and quacksalvers). As Katritzky shows, quacks, male or female, combined, in widely varying proportions, three elements: the medical, the itinerant and the theatrical. Above all, they were performers. They used theatricality, in its widest possible sense, to attract customers and to promote and advertise their pharmaceuticals and health care services. Katritzky investigates here the performative aspects of quack marketing and healing methods, and their profound links with the rise of Europe’s professional actresses, fields of enquiry which are only now beginning to attract significant attention from historians of medicine, economics or the theatre. Women, Medicine and Theatre also recovers women’s roles in the economy of the itinerant quack stage. Women associated with mountebank troupes were medically and theatrically active at every level from major stage celebrities to humble urine sample collectors, but also included sedentary relatives, non-performing assistants, door- and bookkeepers, wardrobe mistresses, prop and costume loaners, landladies, spectators, patrons and clients. Katritzky’s study of the whole range of women who supported the troupes contextualizes the activities of their male counterparts, and rehabilitates a broad spectrum of diversely occupied women. The strength of this title’s research method lies in its comparative examination of documents that are generally examined from the point of view of either their performative or their medical aspects, by historians of, respectively, the theatre and medicine. Taken as a whole, these handbills, literary descriptions a


Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England

Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England

Author: Richard Preiss

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-05-02

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1108161650

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What did childhood mean in early modern England? To answer this question, this book examines two key contemporary institutions: the school and the stage. The rise of grammar schools and universities, and of the professional stage featuring boy actors, reflect the culture's massive investment in children. In this collection, an international group of well-respected scholars examines how the representation of children by major playwrights and poets reflected the period's educational and cultural values. This book contains chapters that range from Shakespeare and Ben Jonson to the contemporary plays of Tom Stoppard, and that explore childhood in relation to classical humanism, medicine, art, and psychology, revealing how early modern performance and educational practices produced attitudes to childhood that still resonate to this day.


Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

Author: Daniel Cadman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1317052129

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Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama examines the development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as ’closet drama’, during the years 1590-1613. It is the first book-length study since 1924 to consider these plays - the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd - as a coherent group. Daniel Cadman suggests these works interrogate the relations between sovereigns and subjects during the early modern period by engaging with the humanist discourses of republicanism and stoicism. Cadman argues that the texts under study probe various aspects of this dynamic and illuminate the ways in which stoicism and republicanism provide essential frameworks for negotiating this relationship between the marginalized courtier and the absolute sovereign. He demonstrates how aristocrats and courtiers, such as Sidney, Greville, Alexander, and Cary, were able to use the neo-Senecan form to consider aspects of their limited political agency under an absolute monarch, while others, such as Brandon and Daniel, respond to similarly marginalized positions within both political and patronage networks. In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political culture, this book addresses several gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama and explores new contexts in relation to more familiar writers, as well as extending the critical debate to include hitherto neglected authors.


Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood

Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood

Author: Naomi J. Miller

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9781409429975

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Drawing on art history, literary studies and social history, the essays in this volume explore a range of intersections between gender and constructions of childhood in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, England, France and Spain. Contributors examine representations of children and childhood in a range of sources from the period, from paintings and poetry to legal records and personal correspondence.


Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence

Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence

Author: S. Simkin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2005-12-15

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0230597114

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This study considers parallel issues in revenge tragedies of the early seventeenth-century and violent cinema of the last thirty years. It offers a series of provocative explorations of death, revenge and justice, and gender and violence. What happens when we connect The White Devil with Basic Instinct ? The Changeling or Titus Andronicus with Straw Dogs ? Doctor Faustus with Se7en ? Taxi Driver with The Spanish Tragedy ? Appealing to those with an interest in either drama or film, written in an engaging style, the book also reconsiders the high /popular culture divide, and reflects on the enduring significance of the revenge motif in Western culture over the past four hundred years, particularly in the post 9/11 context.