Strangeness in Jacobean Drama
Strangeness in Jacobean Drama

Author: Callan Davies

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 100017431X

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Callan Davies presents “strangeness” as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama—one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as “Shakespeare’s late plays,” “tragicomedy,” or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama
Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama

Author: Bruce Boehrer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-02-14

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1107311039

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In Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama, Bruce Boehrer provides the first general history of the Shakespearean stage to focus primarily on ecological issues. Early modern English drama was conditioned by the environmental events of the cities and landscapes within which it developed. Boehrer introduces Jacobean London as the first modern European metropolis in an England beset by problems of overpopulation; depletion of resources and species; land, water and air pollution; disease and other health-related issues; and associated changes in social behavior and cultural output. In six chapters he discusses the work of the most productive and influential playwrights of the day: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher, Dekker and Heywood, exploring the strategies by which they made sense of radical ecological change in their drama. In the process, Boehrer sketches out these playwrights' differing responses to environmental issues and traces their legacy for later literary formulations of green consciousness.

Elizabethan Jacobean Drama
Elizabethan Jacobean Drama

Author: Blakemore G. Evans

Publisher: New Amsterdam Books

Published: 1998-04-21

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1461710790

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The purpose of this absorbing collection is to illuminate the world of the theatre by setting it squarely in its historical context. To that end, Professor Evans draws on the whole spectrum of Elizabethan-Jacobean writing, from official documents to diaries and letters. Part I, The Theatre and the World, deals, through contemporary writings, with the drama itself, the audiences and their responses, theatrical companies, acting and actors, and buildings and technical matters. Part II, The Worlds and the Theatre, illustrates how the problems of everyday life, complicated as they were by moral, religious, social, political, and economic issues, provided an ever-fruitful source of materials to the dramatists who practiced their craft during this extraordinarily creative period.

Jacobean Drama
Jacobean Drama

Author: Pascale Aebischer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2010-07-30

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 1350309974

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The plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are increasingly popular thanks to a spate of recent stage and screen productions and to courses that set Shakespeare's plays in context. This Reader's Guide introduces students to the criticism and debates that are specific to the drama of playwrights such as Jonson, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. Pascale Aebischer explores recent critical developments in key areas including: - How the plays were staged and printed - Innovative editions of plays - How the plays represent and contest the dominant ideologies of the Jacobean period - Dramatic genres - The representation of the human body and of social, gender and race relations - Modern productions on stage and screen Featuring suggestions for further research and reading, and a filmography of commercially available film versions of non-Shakespearean drama, this is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the diverse plays of the Jacobean age.

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama
Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama

Author: Mark Kaethler

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-05-10

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1501513990

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Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton’s dramatic works as responses to James I’s governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of Middleton’s writings, ranging from his first extant play The Phoenix (1604) to his scandalous finale A Game at Chess (1624). In the course of this investigation, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.

Jacobean City Comedy
Jacobean City Comedy

Author: Brian Gibbons

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 135198229X

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The first decade of the Jacobean age witnessed a sudden profusion of comedies satirizing city life; among these were comedies by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, as well as the bulk of the repertory of the newly-established children’s companies at Blackfriars and Paul’s. The playwrights self-consciously forged a new genre which attracted London audiences with its images of folly and vice in Court and City, and hack-writing dramatists were prompt to cash in on a new theatrical fashion. This study, first published in 1980, examines ways in which the Jacobean city comedy reflect on the self-consciousness of audiences and the concern of the dramatists with Jacobean society. This title will be of interest of students of Renaissance Drama, English Literature and Performance.

The Changeling
The Changeling

Author: Thomas Middleton

Publisher:

Published: 1653

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13:

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The Changeling is a popular Renaissance tragedy in which the relationship between money, sex, and power is explored. Frequently performed and studied in University courses, it is a key text in the New Mermaids series.

The Duchess of Malfi
The Duchess of Malfi

Author: John Webster

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1997-06-15

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780719043574

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More widely studied and more frequently performed than ever before, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi is here presented in an accessible and thoroughly up-to-date edition. Based on the Revels Plays text, the notes have been augmented to cast further light both on Webster's amazing dialogue and on the stage action. An entirely new introduction sets the tragedy in the context of pre-Civil War England and gives a revealing view of its imagery and dramatic action. From its well-documented early performances to the two productions seen in the West End of London in the 1995-96 season, a stage history gives an account of the play in performance. Students, actors, directors and theatre-goers will all find here a reappraisal of Webster's artistry in the greatest age of English theatre, which highlights why it has lived on stage with renewed force in the last decades of the twentieth century.