On the Queerness of Early English Drama

On the Queerness of Early English Drama

Author: Tison Pugh

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1487508743

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This book probes occluded depictions of queerness in early English drama, ranging from medieval morality plays to Reformation interludes and beyond.


On the Queerness of Early English Drama

On the Queerness of Early English Drama

Author: Tison Pugh

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2021-02-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1487538871

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Often viewed as theologically conservative, many theatrical works of late medieval and early Tudor England nevertheless exploited the performative nature of drama to flirt with unsanctioned expressions of desire, allowing queer identities and themes to emerge. Early plays faced vexing challenges in depicting sexuality, but modes of queerness, including queer scopophilia, queer dialogue, queer characters, and queer performances, fractured prevailing restraints. Many of these plays were produced within male homosocial environments, and thus homosociality served as a narrative precondition of their storylines. Building from these foundations, On the Queerness of Early English Drama investigates occluded depictions of sexuality in late medieval and early Tudor dramas. Tison Pugh explores a range of topics, including the unstable genders of the York Corpus Christi Plays, the morally instructive humour of excremental allegory in Mankind, the confused relationship of sodomy and chastity in John Bale’s historical interludes, and the camp artifice and queer carnival of Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Pugh concludes with Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, pondering the afterlife of medieval drama and its continued utility in probing cultural constructions of gender and sexuality


Medieval Futurity

Medieval Futurity

Author: Will Rogers

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-11-09

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1501513974

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This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.


Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture

Author: Jennifer Higginbotham

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-14

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 3319727699

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This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.


Queer Shakespeare

Queer Shakespeare

Author: Goran Stanivukovic

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-07-13

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1474295274

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Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality draws together 13 essays, which offer a major reassessment of the criticism of desire, body and sexuality in Shakespeare's drama and poetry. Bringing together some of the most prominent critics working at the intersection of Shakespeare criticism and queer theory, this collection demonstrates the vibrancy of queer Shakespeare studies. Taken together, these essays explore embodiment, desire, sexuality and gender as key objects of analyses, producing concepts and ideas that draw critical energy from focused studies of time, language and nature. The Afterword extends these inquiries by linking the Anthropocene and queer ecology with Shakespeare criticism. Works from Shakespeare's entire canon feature in essays which explore topics like glass, love, antitheatrical homophobia, size, narrative, sound, female same-sex desire and Petrarchism, weather, usury and sodomy, male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing, contagion, and antisocial procreation.


A Companion to Renaissance Drama

A Companion to Renaissance Drama

Author: Arthur F. Kinney

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 2002-06-10

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 9780631219507

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This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.


Shakesqueer

Shakesqueer

Author: Madhavi Menon

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2011-02

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 0822348454

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Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory. This innovative anthology reveals an early modern playwright insistently returning to questions of language, identity, and temporality, themes central to contemporary queer theory. Since many of the contributors do not study early modern literature, Shakesqueer takes queer theory back and brings Shakespeare forward, challenging the chronological confinement of queer theory to the last two hundred years. The book also challenges conceptual certainties that have narrowly equated queerness with homosexuality. Chasing all manner of stray desires through every one of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors cross temporal, animal, theoretical, and sexual boundaries with abandon. Claiming adherence to no one school of thought, the essays consider The Winter’s Tale alongside network TV, Hamlet in relation to the death drive, King John as a history of queer theory, and Much Ado About Nothing in tune with a Sondheim musical. Together they expand the reach of queerness and queer critique across chronologies, methodologies, and bodies. Contributors. Matt Bell, Amanda Berry, Daniel Boyarin, Judith Brown, Steven Bruhm, Peter Coviello, Julie Crawford, Drew Daniel, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Aranye Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Daniel Juan Gil, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, Stephen Guy-Bray, Ellis Hanson, Sharon Holland, Cary Howie, Lynne Huffer, Barbara Johnson, Hector Kollias, James Kuzner , Arthur L. Little Jr., Philip Lorenz, Heather Love, Jeffrey Masten, Robert McRuer , Madhavi Menon, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Andrew Nicholls, Kevin Ohi, Patrick R. O’Malley, Ann Pellegrini, Richard Rambuss, Valerie Rohy, Bethany Schneider, Kathryn Schwarz, Laurie Shannon, Ashley T. Shelden, Alan Sinfield, Bruce Smith, Karl Steel, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Amy Villarejo, Julian Yates


The Shapes of Fancy

The Shapes of Fancy

Author: Christine Varnado

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1452961638

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Exploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance. Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four “shapes of fancy”: the desire to be used to others’ ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as “queer” because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed. This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.