Gammer Gurton's Needle
Gammer Gurton's Needle

Author: Charles Whitworth

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-06-13

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1408143879

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Published in 1575 and acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, probably as early as King Edward VI's reign, the drama of Grandma Gurton and her lost sewing needle, which is finally retrieved from the bottom of her servant Hodge's breeches, is an outstanding example of mid-Tudor comedy. Although a university production, the play's doggerel rhymes, its village characters and their dialect speech, its seemingly innocuous plot and its Rabelaisian humour are the very opposite of academic or neo-classical. Yet its anonymous author's ingenuity manifests itself at every turn, not least in the multiple ironies evoked when Diccon the trickster makes Hodge believe that he will conjure the devil by kissing his backside in a travesty of religious or masonic oath-taking.

Distracted Subjects
Distracted Subjects

Author: Carol Thomas Neely

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780801489242

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'Distracted Subjects' offers a feminist analysis of early modern madness. Carol Neely reveals the mobility & heterogeneity of discourses of 'distraction', the most common term for the condition in late 16th & early 17th century England.

Gammer Gurton's Needle
Gammer Gurton's Needle

Author: Various

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2021-04-25

Total Pages: 97

ISBN-13:

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'Gammer Gurton's Needle' is the second earliest extant English comedy, properly so called. The play is a comedy-farce in five acts, the central idea being the loss by an old dame of her needle, a half-crazy mischief-making wag setting it about that this (at that time of day) precious possession has been stolen by another old woman, the whole village being ultimately set by the ears about the matter. Finally it is found sticking in the breech of Gammer Gurton's man Hodge.

Theatre and Humanism
Theatre and Humanism

Author: Kent Cartwright

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-09-09

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1139425994

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English drama at the beginning of the sixteenth century was allegorical, didactic and moralistic; but by the end of the century theatre was censured as emotional and even immoral. How could such a change occur? Kent Cartwright suggests that some theories of early Renaissance theatre - particularly the theory that Elizabethan plays are best seen in the tradition of morality drama - need to be reconsidered. He proposes instead that humanist drama of the sixteenth century is theatrically exciting - rather than literary, elitist and dull as it has often been seen - and socially significant, and he attempts to integrate popular and humanist values rather than setting them against each other. Taking as examples the plays of Marlowe, Heywood, Lyly and Greene, as well as many by lesser-known dramatists, the book demonstrates the contribution of humanist drama to the theatrical vitality of the sixteenth century.

The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama
The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama

Author: Christina M. Fitzgerald

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2012-12-05

Total Pages: 595

ISBN-13: 1554810566

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The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical drama—has been fundamentally altered. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays. Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.