Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage offers a timely alternative to theatre criticism's neglect of the intensely spatial character of theatrical performance. The book shows that early modern audiences were highly aware of the spatial aspects of the stage. West examines the ways Jacobean dramatists used stage space to explore the spatial transformations of early modern society - social mobility, wandering populations, rural enclosure, sea travel, localized empirical thought. Dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Webster are scrutinized for their treatment of these controversial themes.
Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.
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
During the early days of the professional English theatre, dramatists including Dekker, Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare wrote for playhouses that, though enclosed by surrounding walls, remained open to the ambient air and the sky above. The drama written for performance at these open-air venues drew attention to and reflected on its own relationship to the space of the air. At a time when theories of the imagination emphasized dramatic performance's reliance upon and implication in the air from and through which its staged fictions were presented and received, plays written for performance at open-air venues frequently draw attention to the nature and significance of that elemental relationship. Aerial Environments on the Early Modern Stage considers the various ways in which the air is brought into presence within early modern drama, analyzing more than a hundred works that were performed at the London open-air playhouses between 1576 and 1609, with reference to theatrical atmospheres and aerial encounters. It explores how various theatrical effects and staging strategies foregrounded early modern drama's relationship to, and impact on, the actual playhouse air. In considering open-air drama's pervasive and ongoing attention to aerial imagery, actions, and representational strategies, the book suggest that playwrights and their companies developed a dramaturgical awareness that extended from the earth to encompass and make explicit the space of air.
This collection offers an overview of the ways in which space has become relevant to the study of Shakespearean drama and theatre. It distinguishes various facets of space, such as structural aspects of dramatic composition, performance space and the evocation of place, linguistic, social and gendered spaces, early modern geographies, and the impact of theatrical mobility on cultural exchange and the material world. These facets of space are exemplified in individual essays. Throughout, the Shakespearean stage is conceived as a topological ‘node’, or interface between different times, places and people – an approach which also invokes Edward Soja’s notion of ‘Thirdspace’ to describe the blend between the real and the imaginary characteristic of Shakespeare’s multifaceted theatrical world. Part Two of the volume emphasises the theatrical mobility of Hamlet – conceptually from an anthropological perspective, and historically in the tragedy’s migrations to Germany, Russia and North America.
Early seventeenth-century London playwrights used actual locations in their comedies while simultaneously exploring London as an imagined, ephemeral, urban space. Producing Early Modern London examines this tension between representing place and producing urban space. In analyzing the theater's use of city spaces and places, Kelly J. Stage shows how the satirical comedies of the early seventeenth century came to embody the city as the city embodied the plays. Stage focuses on city plays by George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, William Haughton, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. While the conventional labels of "city comedy" or "citizen comedy" have often been applied to these plays, she argues that London comedies defy these genre categorizations because the ruptures, expansions, conflicts, and imperfections of the expanding city became a part of their form. Rather than defining the "city comedy," comedy in this period proved to be the genre of London. As the expansion of London's social space exceeded the strict confines of the "square mile," the city burgeoned into a new metropolis. The satiric comedies of this period became, in effect, playgrounds for urban experimentation. Early seventeenth-century playwrights seized the opportunity to explore the myriad ways in which London worked, taking the expected--a romance plot, a typical father-son conflict, a cross-dressing intrigue--and turning it into a multifaceted, complex story of interaction and proximity.
Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this, first, by establishing how characters think through their surroundings — not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations, but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorise and thematise the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as The Malcontent, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine, King Lear, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Bartholomew Fair, this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how, in doing so, theatre altered the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and imagined place in early modern England.
With its three-part rubric of London, drama, and space, this study brings to the currently vigorous critical discussion of Jonsonian authorship the sense of how another sort of dramatic text—that of London’s spaces as interpreted through dramatic practice both in the streets of the city and on its stages—is also an integral factor in the emergence of the early modern author.
Theatre's Heterotopias analyses performance space, using the concept of heterotopia: a location that, when apparent in performance, refers to the actual world, thus activating performance in its culture. Case studies cover site-specific and multimedia performance, and selected productions from the National Theatre of Scotland and the Globe Theatre.
