Restoration Staging, 1660-74
Restoration Staging, 1660-74

Author: Tim Keenan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1317064690

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Restoration Staging 1660–74 cuts through prevalent ideas of Restoration theatre and drama to read early plays in their original theatrical contexts. Tim Keenan argues that Restoration play texts contain far more information about their own performance than previously imagined. Focusing on specific productions and physical staging at the three theatres operating in the first years of the Restoration – Vere Street, Bridges Street and Lincoln’s Inn Fields – Keenan analyses stage directions, scene headings and other performance clues embedded in the play-texts themselves. These close readings shed new light on staging practices of the period, building a radical new model of early Restoration staging. Restoration Staging, 1660–74 takes account of all extant new plays written for or premiered at three of London’s early theatres, presenting a much-needed reassessment of early Restoration drama.

Staging the revolution
Staging the revolution

Author: Rachel Willie

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2015-10-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1784996149

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Staging the revolution offers a reappraisal of the weight and volume of theatrical output during the commonwealth and early Restoration, both in terms of live performances and performances on the paper stage. It argues that the often-cited notion that 1642 marked an end to theatrical production in England until the playhouses were reopened in 1660 is a product of post-Restoration re-writing of the English civil wars and the representations of royalists and parliamentarians that emerged in the 1640s and 1650s. These retellings of recent events in dramatic form mean that drama is central to civil-war discourse. Staging the revolution examines the ways in which drama was used to rewrite the civil war and commonwealth period and demonstrates that, far from marking a clear cultural demarcation from the theatrical output of the early seventeenth century, the Restoration is constantly reflecting back on the previous thirty years.

Staging for the Emperors
Staging for the Emperors

Author: Liana Chen (Assistant professor)

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9781621965480

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"Theatrical performance occupied a central place in the emotional and political life of the Qing dynasty imperial household. For over two centuries, the Qing court poured a tremendous amount of human and material resources into institutionalizing the theatrical arts for the purposes of entertainment and edification. The emperors and empresses were ardent patrons and key players in establishing an artistic form that the court theatre called its own. They went to great lengths to cultivate a discerning taste in theatre and oversaw the artistic and managerial aspects of court theatrical activities. In the imperial theatrical spaces within and outside the Forbidden City, which were designed and built with the capacity to produce stunning visual effects, theatrical productions were staged to entertain imperial family members and to impress obeisance-paying guests from near and afar. Treating Qing dynasty court theatre as a unique site in which to examine important but uncharted realms of Chinese theatrical experience, Staging for the Emperor examines two distinct and interlocking dimensions of the Qing court theatre-the vicissitudes of the palace troupe and the multifaceted functions of court-commissioned ceremonial dramas-to highlight the diverse array of views held by individual rulers as they used theatrical means to promote their personal and political agendas. Drawing on recently discovered materials from a variety of court administrative bureaus, memoirs, diaries, and play scripts written for court ceremonial occasions, this study places the history of Qing court theatre in the broader context of Qing cultural and political history. Staging for the Emperors would appeal to readers interested in China studies and performance studies. It would also appeal to those outside the field of China studies who are interested in developing a cross-cultural perspective on the interplay between state rituals, power, identity formation, and theatrical experiences"--

Shakespeare and Wales
Shakespeare and Wales

Author: Professor Philip Schwyzer

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1409475662

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Shakespeare and Wales offers a 'Welsh correction' to a long-standing deficiency. It explores the place of Wales in Shakespeare's drama and in Shakespeare criticism, covering ground from the absorption of Wales into the Tudor state in 1536 to Shakespeare on the Welsh stage in the twenty-first century. Shakespeare's major Welsh characters, Fluellen and Glendower, feature prominently, but the Welsh dimension of the histories as a whole, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline also come in for examination. The volume also explores the place of Welsh-identified contemporaries of Shakespeare such as Thomas Churchyard and John Dee, and English writers with pronounced Welsh interests such as Spenser, Drayton and Dekker. This volume brings together experts in the field from both sides of the Atlantic, including leading practitioners of British Studies, in order to establish a detailed historical context that illustrates the range and richness of Shakespeare's Welsh sources and resources, and confirms the degree to which Shakespeare continues to impact upon Welsh culture and identity even as the process of devolution in Wales serves to shake the foundations of Shakespeare's status as an unproblematic English or British dramatist.

The Cornucopian Stage
The Cornucopian Stage

Author: Ariel Fox

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1684176816

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The long seventeenth century in China was a period of tremendous commercial expansion, and no literary genre was better equipped to articulate its possibilities than southern drama. As a form and a practice, southern drama was in the business of world-building--both in its structural imperative to depict and reconcile the social whole and in its creation of entire economies dependent on its publication and performance. However, the early modern commercial world repelled rather than engaged most playwrights, who consigned its totems--the merchant and his money--to the margins as sources of political suspicion and cultural anxiety. In The Cornucopian Stage, Ariel Fox examines a body of influential yet understudied plays by a circle of Suzhou playwrights who enlisted the theatrical imaginary to very different ends. In plays about long-distance traders and small-time peddlers, impossible bargains and broken contracts, strings of cash and storehouses of silver, the Suzhou circle placed commercial forms not only at center stage but at the center of a new world coming into being. Here, Fox argues, the economic character of early modern selfhood is recast as fundamentally productive--as the basis for new subject positions, new kinds of communities, and new modes of art.

Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage
Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage

Author: Ray Miller

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-17

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1000876020

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Dance on the American Musical Theatre Stage: A History chronicles the development of dance, with an emphasis on musicals and the Broadway stage, in the United States from its colonial beginnings to performances of the present day. This book explores the fascinating tug-and-pull between the European classical, folk, and social dance imports and America’s indigenous dance forms as they met and collided on the popular musical theatre stage. This historical background influenced a specific musical theatre movement vocabulary and a unique choreographic approach that is recognizable today as Broadway-style dancing. Throughout the book, a cultural context is woven into the history to reveal how the competing values within American culture, and its attempts as a nation to define and redefine itself, played out through developments in dance on the musical theatre stage. This book is central to the conversation on how dance influences and reflects society, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Musical Theatre, Theatre Studies, Dance, and Cultural History.

This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear
This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear

Author: Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-08-24

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1474289061

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From providential apocalypticism to climate change, this ground-breaking ecocritical study traces the performance history of the storm scene in King Lear to explore our shifting, fraught and deeply ideological relationship with stormy weather across time. This Contentious Storm offers a new ecocritical reading of Shakespeare's classic play, illustrating how the storm has been read as a sign of the providential, cosmological, meteorological, psychological, neurological, emotional, political, sublime, maternal, feminine, heroic and chaotic at different points in history. The big ecocritical history charted here reveals the unstable significance of the weather and mobilises details of the play's dramatic narrative to figure the weather as a force within self, society and planet.