The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre

The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre

Author: Deborah Payne Fisk

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-05-11

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780521588126

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Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.


Perspectives on Restoration Drama

Perspectives on Restoration Drama

Author: Susan J. Owen

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 9780719049675

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This book introduces students to drama from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the early 18th Century. Susan Owen offers representative coverage of new forms of drama in this period, and of ways in which old forms are altered. Her study covers heroic drama, comedy, tragedy, tragi-comedy, and Shakespeare adaptations, by focusing on specific 'dramatic highlights' and giving close reading of particular plays.


The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn

The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn

Author: Derek Hughes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-11-25

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1139826948

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Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration. She provided more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influenced the development of the novel with her ground-breaking fiction, especially Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister and Oroonoko, the first English novel set in America. Behn's work straddles the genres: beside drama and fiction, she also excelled in poetry and she made several important translations from French libertine and scientific works. This Companion discusses and introduces her writings in all these fields and provides the critical tools with which to judge their aesthetic and historical importance. It also includes a full bibliography, a detailed chronology and a description of the known facts of her life. The Companion will be an essential tool for the study of this increasingly important writer and thinker.


Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater

Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater

Author: Deborah Payne Fisk

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0820337897

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Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth. By reading well-known works in unexpected ways and focusing on less frequently studied dramatists, from Sedley, Motteux, Pix, and Behn to Manley, Trotter, and Shadwell, the contributors also test the limits of the canon. In addition, they suggest that earlier critical perceptions, perhaps even more than the “innate worth” of the plays, determined the shape of the canon. These essays present a different image of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, one that reveals how the drama was a site as important for the negotiation of cultural meaning as were novels and verse satires.


Restoration Plays and Players

Restoration Plays and Players

Author: David Roberts

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-10-30

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1316147975

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Introducing readers to the key texts, theatrical practice and context of late seventeenth-century drama, David Roberts combines literary and theatrical approaches to show how Restoration plays were written, performed, received and printed. Structured according to the 'life cycle' of the dramatic text, this book reproduces extracts from twenty-four of the most influential Restoration plays to provide readers with a comprehensive and colourful introduction to the period's drama. Roberts encourages readers to look beyond a limited canon of established plays and practice, and to see how Restoration Drama has been revived and adapted on the modern stage. Restoration Plays and Players is of great interest to undergraduate and non-specialist readers of seventeenth-century drama, Restoration literature and theatre studies.


A Companion to Restoration Drama

A Companion to Restoration Drama

Author: Susan J. Owen

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 2008-02-26

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 9781405176101

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This Companion illustrates the vitality and diversity of dramatic work 1660 to 1710. Twenty-five essays by leading scholars in the field bring together the best recent insights into the full range of dramatic practice and innovation at the time. Introduces readers to the recent boom in scholarship that has revitalised Restoration drama Explores historical and cultural contexts, genres of Restoration drama, and key dramatists, among them Dryden and Behn


Restoration Theatre and Crisis

Restoration Theatre and Crisis

Author: Susan J. Owen

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 1996-11-14

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0191584002

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Restoration Theatre and Crisis is a seminal study of the drama of the Restoration, in particular that of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. This was a time of unprecedented political partisanship in the theatre. This book cosniders all the known plays of this period, including works by Dryden and Behn, in their historical context. It examines the complex ways in which the drama both reflected and intervened in the political process, at a time when the crisis fractured an already fragile post-interregnum consensus, and modern party political methods first began to develop. Susan Owen discusses the ways in which Tory and Whig playwrights engaged in dramatic dialogue, deliberately commenting on and revising each other's themes and topics. The book also explores the arena of sexual politics, examining the political significance of themes such as disharmony in the family, and the importance of rape as a dramatic signifier of monstrosity associated with rebellion by the Tories and tyranny and popery by the Whigs. Restoration Theatre and Crisis considers the use of sexuality as a political discourse, and ways in which ideas about libertinism and constructions of masculinity and femininity intersect with political concerns in the drama. Thus the book bridges the gap between `gender-blind' political accounts and studies which have focused on gender themes in the drama in isolation from party politics.