Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance.
A New Companion to Renaissance Drama provides an invaluable summary of past and present scholarship surrounding the most popular and influential literary form of its time. Original interpretations from leading scholars set the scene for important paths of future inquiry. A colorful, comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the material conditions of Renaissance plays, England's most important dramatic period Contributors are both established and emerging scholars, with many leading international figures in the discipline Offers a unique approach by organizing the chapters by cultural context, theatre history, genre studies, theoretical applications, and material studies Chapters address newest departures and future directions for Renaissance drama scholarship Arthur Kinney is a world-renowned figure in the field
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.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing essays and studies as well as book reviews of the many significant books and essays dealing with the cultural history of medieval and early modern England as expressed by and realized in its drama exclusive of Shakespeare.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that has still not shed deeply ingrained imperialist habits of marking difference.
A new account of Shakespearean tragedy as a response to life in an uncertain world In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it—of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter. After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare’s tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author’s nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning—from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis’s Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us. A major reevaluation of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.
In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.
Marta Straznicky offers a detailed historical analysis of early modern women's closet plays: plays explicitly written for reading, rather than public performance. She reveals that such works were part of an alternative dramatic tradition, an elite and private literary culture, which was understood as intellectually superior to and politically more radical than commercial drama. Elizabeth Cary, Jane Lumley, Anne Finch and Margaret Cavendish wrote their plays in this conjunction of the public and the private at a time when male playwrights dominated the theatres. In her astute readings of the texts, their contexts and their physical appearance in print or manuscript, Straznicky has produced many fresh insights into the place of women's closet plays both in the history of women's writing and in the history of English drama.
"In this study, Lois E. Bueler examines in broad literary historical terms what she calls the Tested Woman Plot, a "story-machine" that originated in the ancient Mediterranean world (as in the stories of Eve and Lucretia), flourished in English Renaissance drama (as in Much Ado about Nothing and The Changeling), and continued into the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as in Clarissa, Adam Bede, and The Scarlet Letter)." "Encyclopedic in scope, The Tested Woman Plot is a provocative look at a key narrative tradition that spans many genres and should appeal to all serious students of literature."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Reading Drama in Tudor England is about the print invention of drama as a category of text designed for readerly consumption. Arguing that plays were made legible by the printed paratexts that accompanied them, it shows that by the middle of the sixteenth century it was possible to market a play for leisure-time reading. Offering a detailed analysis of such features as title-pages, character lists, and other paratextual front matter, it suggests that even before the establishment of successful permanent playhouses, playbooks adopted recognisable conventions that not only announced their categorical status and genre but also suggested appropriate forms of use. As well as a survey of implied reading practices, this study is also about the historical owners and readers of plays. Examining the marks of use that survive in copies of early printed plays, it explores the habits of compilation and annotation that reflect the striking and often unpredictable uses to which early owners subjected their playbooks.
