Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court
Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court

Author: Kevin Curran

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1317100239

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Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court constitutes the first full-length study of Jacobean nuptial performance, a hitherto unexplored branch of early modern theater consisting of masques and entertainments performed for high-profile weddings. Scripted by such writers as Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont, these entertainments were mounted for some of the most significant political events of James's English reign. Here Kevin Curran analyzes all six of the elite weddings celebrated at the Jacobean court, reading the masques and entertainments that headlined these events alongside contemporaneously produced panegyrics, festival books, sermons, parliamentary speeches, and other sources. The study shows how, collectively, wedding entertainments turned the idea of union into a politically versatile category of national representation and offered new ways of imagining a specifically Jacobean form of national identity by doing so.

Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England
Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England

Author: Daniel Blank

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-03-02

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0192886096

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Dramatic performances at the universities in early modern England have usually been regarded as insular events, completely removed from the plays of the London stage. Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England challenges that long-held notion, illuminating how an apparently secluded theatrical culture became a major source of inspiration for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While many university plays featured classical themes, others reflected upon the academic environments in which they were produced, allowing a window into the universities themselves. This window proved especially fruitful for Shakespeare, who, as this book reveals, had a sustained fascination with the universities and their inhabitants. Daniel Blank provides groundbreaking new readings of plays from throughout Shakespeare's career, illustrating how depictions of academic culture in Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, and Macbeth were shaped by university plays. Shakespeare was not unique, however. This book also discusses the impact of university drama on professional plays by Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Ben Jonson, all of whom in various ways facilitated the connection between the university stage and the London commercial stage. Yet this connection, perhaps counterintuitively, is most significant in the works of a playwright who had no formal attachment to Oxford or Cambridge. Shakespeare, this study shows, was at the center of a rich exchange between two seemingly disparate theatrical worlds.

Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England
Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England

Author: Mr Gabriel A Rieger

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1409475581

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Drawing upon recent scholarship in Renaissance studies regarding notions of the body, political, physical and social, this study examines how the satiric tragedians of the English Renaissance employ the languages of sex – including sexual slander, titillation, insinuation and obscenity – in the service of satiric aggression. There is a close association between the genre of satire and sexually descriptive language in the period, author Gabriel Rieger argues, particularly in the ways in which both the genre and the languages embody systems of oppositions. In exploring the various purposes which sexually descriptive language serves for the satiric tragedian, Rieger reviews a broad range of texts, ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary, by satiric tragedians, moralists, medical writers and critics, paying particular attention to the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and John Webster

Bodies, Speech, and Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England
Bodies, Speech, and Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England

Author: Sara D. Luttfring

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-07-16

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 131753445X

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This volume examines early modern representations of women’s reproductive knowledge through new readings of plays, monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, court records, histories, and more, which are often interpreted as depicting female reproductive bodies as passive, silenced objects of male control and critique. Luttfring argues instead that these texts represent women exercising epistemological control over reproduction through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance into what Luttfring calls 'bodily narratives.' The power of these bodily narratives extends beyond knowledge of individual bodies to include the ways that women’s stories about reproduction shape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and kings. In the popular print and theater of early modern England, women’s bodies, women’s speech, and in particular women’s speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. This book joins growing critical discussion of how female reproductive bodies were used to represent socio-political concerns and will be of interest to students and scholars working in early modern literature and culture, women’s history, and the history of medicine.

The Absence of America
The Absence of America

Author: Gavin Hollis

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0198734328

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The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576-1642 looks at London theatre at the time of Shakespeare and how it represented the New World, considering whether early modern drama was anti-American, as some contemporaries suggested.

Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory
Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory

Author: Neema Parvini

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-11-08

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1441193936

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A complete critical introduction to New Historicist and Cultural Materialist approaches that have dominated contemporary Shakespeare theory, as well as alternative new directions.

The Life of William Shakespeare
The Life of William Shakespeare

Author: Lois Potter

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2012-03-07

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 1118231775

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The Life of William Shakespeare is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of Shakespeare's life and works focusing on oftern neglected literary and historical contexts: what Shakespeare read, who he worked with as an author and an actor, and how these various collaborations may have affected his writing. Written by an eminent Shakespearean scholar and experienced theatre reviewer Pays particular attention to Shakespeare's theatrical contemporaries and the ways in which they influenced his writing Offers an intriguing account of the life and work of the great poet-dramatist structured around the idea of memory Explores often neglected literary and historical contexts that illuminate Shakespeare's life and works

Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England
Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England

Author: Martin Wiggins

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2012-08-02

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 0191650404

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The state is at its most volatile when supreme power changes hands. This book studies five such moments of transfer in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from Henry VIII to the English Revolution, pazying particular attention to the political function and agency of drama in smoothing the transition. Masques and civic pageants served as an art form by which incoming authority could declare its power, and subjects could express their willing subordination to the new regime. The book contains vivid case studies of these dramatic works, some of which have never before been identified, and the circumstances for which they were written: the use of London street theatre in 1535 to promote Henry VIII's arrogation of Royal Supremacy; the aggressively Protestant court masque of 1559 which marked the accession of Elizabeth I, and the censorship which resulted when the same mode of dramatic discourse spread to more plebeian stages; the masques and entertainments of James I's initial year on the English throne, through which the new Stuart dynasty asserted its legitimacy and individual courtiers made their bids for influence; and the formal coronation entry to London, furnished with dramatic pageants, which London paid for but Charles I refused to undertake. The final chapter describes how, in 1642, a very different incoming regime planned to ignore drama altogether, until some surprisingly contingent circumstances forced its hand.

England and Spain in the Early Modern Era
England and Spain in the Early Modern Era

Author: Óscar Alfredo Ruiz Fernández

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-12-12

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1350133434

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The early 17th century was a time of great literature the era of Cervantes and Shakespeare but also of international tension and heightened diplomacy. This book looks at the relations between Spain under Philip III and Philip IV and England under James I in the period 1603-1625. It examines the essential issues that established the framework for diplomatic relations between the two states, looking not only at questions of war and peace, but also of trade and piracy. Óscar Alfredo Ruiz Fernández expertly argues that the diplomatic relationship was vital to the strategic interests of both powers and also played a highly significant role in the domestic agendas of each country. Based on Spanish and English archival sources, England and Spain in the Early Modern Era provides, for the first time, a clear picture of diplomacy between England and Spain in the early modern era.

Literature and Union
Literature and Union

Author: Gerard Carruthers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-01-06

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0192548441

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Literature and Union opens up a new front in interdisciplinary literary studies. There has been a great deal of academic work--both in the Scottish context and more broadly--on the relationship between literature and nationhood, yet almost none on the relationship between literature and unions. This volume introduces the insights of the new British history into mainstream Scottish literary scholarship. The contributors, who are from all shades of the political spectrum, will interrogate from various angles the assumption of a binary opposition between organic Scottish values and those supposedly imposed by an overbearing imperial England. Viewing Scottish literature as a clash between Scottish and English identities loses sight of the internal Scottish political and religious divisions, which, far more than issues of nationhood and union, were the primary sources of conflict in Scottish culture for most of the period of Union, until at least the early twentieth century. The aim of the volume is to reconstruct the story of Scottish literature along lines which are more historically persuasive than those of the prevailing grand narratives in the field. The chapters fall into three groups: (1) those which highlight canonical moments in Scottish literary Unionism--John Bull, 'Rule, Britannia', Humphry Clinker, Ivanhoe and England, their England; (2) those which investigate key themes and problems, including the Unions of 1603 and 1707, Scottish Augustanism, the Burns Cult, Whig-Presbyterian and sentimental Jacobite literatures; and (3) comparative pieces on European and Anglo-Irish phenomena.