Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance
Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance

Author: Linda Phyllis Austern

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-30

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1040117457

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Originally published in 1992, Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance is the first book-length study to examine the Elizabethan and Jacobean children’s drama, not only from a musicological perspective, but also drawing on the histories of literature, culture, and the theater. It gives the children’s companies new historical significance, showing that they were an integral and ultimately influential part of the London theatrical world. These companies originated important features of later drama, such as music before and between acts, and the exploitation of different timbres for specific effects. Those interested in music history, English literature, theater history, and cultural history will find this a comprehensive and fascinating study. Of special note are the appendices, which offer a unique and important reference source by providing the only definitive list of the plays and songs used by the children.

Music and Gender in English Renaissance Drama
Music and Gender in English Renaissance Drama

Author: Katrine K. Wong

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1136169695

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This book offers a survey of how female and male characters in English Renaissance theatre participated and interacted in musical activities, both inside and outside the contemporary societal decorum. Wong’s analysis broadens our understanding of the general theatrical representation of music, or musical dramaturgy, and complicates the current discussion of musical portrayal and construction of gender during this period. Wong discusses dramaturgical meanings of music and its association with gender, love, and erotomania in Renaissance plays. The negotiation between the dichotomous qualities of the heavenly and the demonic finds extensive application in recent studies of music in early modern English plays. However, while ideological dualities identified in music in traditional Renaissance thinking may seem unequivocal, various musical representations of characters and situations in early modern drama would prove otherwise. Wong, building upon the conventional model of binarism, explores how playwrights created their musical characters and scenarios according to the received cultural use and perception of music, and, at the same time, experimented with the multivalent meanings and significance embodied in theatrical music.

Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre
Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre

Author: Edel Lamb

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-11-13

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0230594735

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This book investigates how the Children of Paul's (1599-1606) and the Children of the Queen's Revels (1600-13) defined their players as children and, via an analysis of their plays and theatrical practices, it examines early modern theatre as a site in which children have the opportunity to articulate their emerging selfhoods.

Unwritten Poetry
Unwritten Poetry

Author: Scott A. Trudell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-03-07

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0192571699

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Vocal music was at the heart of English Renaissance poetry and drama. Virtuosic actor-singers redefined the theatrical culture of William Shakespeare and his peers. Composers including William Byrd and Henry Lawes shaped the transmission of Renaissance lyric verse. Poets from Philip Sidney to John Milton were fascinated by the disorienting influx of musical performance into their works. Musical performance was a driving force behind the period's theatrical and poetic movements, yet its importance to literary history has long been ignored or effaced. This book reveals the impact of vocalists and composers upon the poetic culture of early modern England by studying the media through which—and by whom—its songs were made. In a literary field that was never confined to writing, media were not limited to material texts. Scott Trudell argues that the media of Renaissance poetry can be conceived as any node of transmission from singer's larynx to actor's body. Through his study of song, Trudell outlines a new approach to Renaissance poetry and drama that is grounded not simply in performance history or book history but in a more synthetic media history.

Pretty Creatures
Pretty Creatures

Author: Michael Witmore

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0801463556

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Children had surprisingly central roles in many of the public performances of the English Renaissance, whether in entertainments—civic pageants, children's theaters, Shakespearean drama—or in more grim religious and legal settings, as when children were "possessed by demons" or testified as witnesses in witchcraft trials. Taken together, such spectacles made repeated connections between child performers as children and the mimetic powers of fiction in general. In Pretty Creatures, Michael Witmore examines the ways in which children, with their proverbial capacity for spontaneous imitation and their imaginative absorption, came to exemplify the virtues and powers of fiction during this era. As much concerned with Renaissance poetics as with children's roles in public spectacles of the period, Pretty Creatures attempts to bring the antics of children—and the rich commentary these antics provoked—into the mainstream of Renaissance studies, performance studies, and studies of reformation culture in England. As such, it represents an alternative history of the concept of mimesis in the period, one that is built from the ground up through reflections on the actual performances of what was arguably nature's greatest mimic: the child.

Thomas Middleton in Context
Thomas Middleton in Context

Author: Suzanne Gossett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-04-21

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0521190541

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An illuminating study of all works in the newly enlarged Middleton canon, placing them in personal, national, international and theatrical contexts.

Boy Actors in Early Modern England
Boy Actors in Early Modern England

Author: Harry R. McCarthy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1009116584

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Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Harry R. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture.

Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton
Reverberating Song in Shakespeare and Milton

Author: Erin Minear

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1317063724

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In this study, Erin Minear explores the fascination of Shakespeare and Milton with the ability of music-heard, imagined, or remembered-to infiltrate language. Such infected language reproduces not so much the formal or sonic properties of music as its effects. Shakespeare's and Milton's understanding of these effects was determined, she argues, by history and culture as well as individual sensibility. They portray music as uncanny and divine, expressive and opaque, promoting associative rather than logical thought processes and unearthing unexpected memories. The title reflects the multiple and overlapping meanings of reverberation in the study: the lingering and infectious nature of musical sound; the questionable status of audible, earthly music as an echo of celestial harmonies; and one writer's allusions to another. Minear argues that many of the qualities that seem to us characteristically 'Shakespearean' stem from Shakespeare's engagement with how music works-and that Milton was deeply influenced by this aspect of Shakespearean poetics. Analyzing Milton's account of Shakespeare's 'warbled notes,' she demonstrates that he saw Shakespeare as a peculiarly musical poet, deeply and obscurely moving his audience with language that has ceased to mean, but nonetheless lingers hauntingly in the mind. Obsessed with the relationship between words and music for reasons of his own, including his father's profession as a composer, Milton would adopt, adapt, and finally reject Shakespeare's form of musical poetics in his own quest to 'join the angel choir.' Offering a new way of looking at the work of two major authors, this study engages and challenges scholars of Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern culture.