Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama
Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama

Author: Frank Whigham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-01-26

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780521564496

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In Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama Frank Whigham combines an analysis of English Renaissance plays with an enriched sense of their social surroundings. He traces the violent gestures of social self-construction that animate many such plays, and the ways in which drama interacts with the conflict-ridden discourses of social, rank, gender, kinship, and service relationships. In Whigham's view, The Spanish Tragedy initiates the 'matter of court,' a complex and marauding discourse of gender warfare and master-servant manipulations; Arden of Faversham explores linked redefinitions of land, service, and marriage in county culture; The Miseries of Enforced Marriage and A Yorkshire Tragedy present a powerful critique of the traditional imperialism of kinship in northern England; and The Duchess of Malfi explores metaphors of erotic transgression.

Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy
Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy

Author: Iman Sheeha

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 100007451X

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Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy considerably advances existing scholarship on the institution of service in early modern culture and as represented on the early modern stage. With its focus on the homes of the middling sorts, to whom the protagonists of domestic tragedy belong, the book expands our understanding of employer-servant relationships beyond elite and aristocratic circles, the focus of previous studies. Drawing on early modern advice literature, household guides, domestic manuals, sermons, treatises, proverbs, mothers’ legacies, funeral sermons, diaries, letters, and jest books as well as making use of the recent findings by social and cultural historians of early modern England, the book examines the consequences of disordered domesticity for the master-servant relationship. This study nuances the picture of domestic servants constructed by both early modern moralists and modern scholarship, arguing against overarching, reductive narratives. The book argues that the experience of household service as depicted in domestic tragedy, like in real life, was complex and varied and that there was no typical experience of service.

The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World
The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World

Author: Elizabeth Fowler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-06-28

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9780521441124

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What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social world? The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World brings together ten essays by leading scholars of the literatures of England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the colonial Americas, to answer these questions in wide-ranging ways. Several of the essays shed light on landmark prose works of the period; some discuss what lesser-known writings reveal about the medium; others move between the literary and the non-literary to reflect on the medium's intersections with history, fiction, subjectivity, the state, science and other aspects of social and cultural life. Overall, this 1997 collection will provoke an international reconsideration of the remarkable visibility and diversity of the medium of prose in the early modern period.

A New Companion to Renaissance Drama
A New Companion to Renaissance Drama

Author: Arthur F. Kinney

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-07-11

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 1118824032

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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

Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England
Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England

Author: Judith Deborah Haber

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-04-09

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0521518679

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This wide-ranging study uses close readings of texts by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton and Ford to investigate the intersections of erotic desire and dramatic form in the early modern period, considering to what extent disruptive desires can successfully challenge, change or undermine the structures in which they are embedded.

Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists
Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists

Author: A. Hiscock

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2007-07-02

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0230593208

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This collection offers practical suggestions for the integration of non-Shakespearean drama into the teaching of Shakespeare. It shows both the ways in which Shakespearean drama is typical of its period and of the ways in which it is distinctive, by looking at Shakespeare and other writers who influenced and developed the genres in which he worked.

The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700
The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700

Author: Lorna Hutson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-06-15

Total Pages: 833

ISBN-13: 0191081973

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This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. Scholars of early modern English literature and history have increasingly found that an understanding of how people in the past thought about and used the law is key to understanding early modern familial and social relations as well as important aspects of the political revolution and the emergence of capitalism. Judicial or forensic rhetoric has been shown to foster new habits of literary composition (poetry and drama) and new processes of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. Accordingly, historians, critics, and legal historians come together in this Handbook to develop accounts of the past that are attentive to the legally purposeful or fictional shaping of events in the historical archive. They also contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the place of forensic modes of inquiry in the creation of imaginative fiction and drama. Chapters in the Handbook approach, from a diversity of perspectives, topics including forensic rhetoric, humanist and legal education, Inns of Court revels, drama, poetry, emblem books, marriage and divorce, witchcraft, contract, property, imagination, oaths, evidence, community, local government, legal reform, libel, censorship, authorship, torture, slavery, liberty, due process, the nation state, colonialism, and empire.

Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama
Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama

Author: Adrian Streete

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-08-17

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 110824856X

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This book examines the many and varied uses of apocalyptic and anti-Catholic language in seventeenth-century English drama. Adrian Streete argues that this rhetoric is not simply an expression of religious bigotry, nor is it only deployed at moments of political crisis. Rather, it is an adaptable and flexible language with national and international implications. It offers a measure of cohesion and order in a volatile century. By rethinking the relationship between theatre, theology and polemic, Streete shows how playwrights exploited these connections for a diverse range of political ends. Chapters focus on playwrights like Marston, Middleton, Massinger, Shirley, Dryden and Lee, and on a range of topics including imperialism, reason of state, commerce, prostitution, resistance, prophecy, church reform and liberty. Drawing on important recent work in religious and political history, this is a major re-interpretation of how and why religious ideas are debated in the early modern theatre.

Unfixable Forms
Unfixable Forms

Author: Katherine Schaap Williams

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1501753517

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Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.