The Rhetoric of the Page
The Rhetoric of the Page

Author: Laurie Maguire

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0192606689

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This wide-ranging and entertaining book explores blank space from incunabula to Google books. Blanks are a paradox—simultaneously nothing and something, gesturing to what was once there or might be there. They are also a creative opportunity for readers as well as writers: readers respond to what is not there and writers come to anticipate that response. Thus, blank space develops literary and ludic applications. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page: physical gaps (Chapter One), marks of incompletion such as &c (Chapter Two), and the asterisk as a stand-in for things that cannot be said (Chapter Three). By looking at the early-modern page as a visual unit as well as a verbal unit, this volume shows how the relationship between textual layout and textual content is as productive for writers as it is for readers. Mise-en-page influences readers in the same way that rhetoric influences readers. It is thus possible to speak of 'the rhetoric of the page'.

A Companion to Tudor Literature
A Companion to Tudor Literature

Author: Kent Cartwright

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-01-21

Total Pages: 568

ISBN-13: 9781444317220

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A Companion to Tudor Literature presents a collection of thirty-one newly commissioned essays focusing on English literature and culture from the reign of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. Presents students with a valuable historical and cultural context to the period Discusses key texts and representative subjects, and explores issues including international influences, religious change, travel and New World discoveries, women’s writing, technological innovations, medievalism, print culture, and developments in music and in modes of seeing and reading

The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama
The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama

Author: Brian W. Schneider

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1317031350

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Though individual prologues and epilogues have been treated in depth, very little scholarship has been published on early modern framing texts as a whole. The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama fills a gap in the literature by examining the origins of these texts, and investigating their growing importance and influence in the theatre of the period. This topic-led discussion of prologues and epilogues deals with the origins of these texts, the difficulty of definition, and the way in which many prologues and epilogues appear to interact on such subjects as the composition of the theatre audience and the perceived place of women in such an audience. Author Brian Schneider also examines the reasons for, and the evidence leading to, the apparently sudden burgeoning of these texts after the Restoration, when prologues and epilogues grace nearly all the dramas of the time and become a virtual cottage industry of their own. The second section-a comprehensive list of prologues and epilogues-details play titles, playwrights, theatres and theatre companies, first performance and the earliest edition in which the framing text(s) appears. It quotes the first line of the prologue and/or epilogue and uses the printer's signature to denote the page on which the texts can be found. Further information is provided in notes appended to the relevant entry. A final section deals with 'free-floating' and 'free-standing' framing texts that appear in verse collections, manuscripts, and other publications and to which no play can be positively ascribed. Combining original analysis with carefully compiled, comprehensive reference data, The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama provides a genuinely new angle on the drama of early modern England.

Shakespeare's History Plays: the Family and the State
Shakespeare's History Plays: the Family and the State

Author: Robert B. Pierce

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0814201520

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Pierce systematically examines the nine history plays of Shakespeare in the 1590s in the approximate sequence of their composition. He discovers in them a constant elaboration and rich development of the correspondence between the family and the state into an ever more subtle and effective dramatic technique. Through a careful analysis of the language, characterization, and plots of the chronicles, Pierce demonstrates how the family served as an analogue of those grave events that marked the turbulent reign of King John and the subsequent terrible century of civil strife and wars with the French that haunted the imaginations of Englishmen more than a hundred years later. At times, he finds, Shakespeare depicts the family as a miniature of the kingdom, and the life of the family becomes a direct or ironic comment on the larger life of the commonwealth. At others, the family is inextricably bound up in a political situation by means of characters who are portrayed both in their public roles and as members of their families.

Reading Drama in Tudor England
Reading Drama in Tudor England

Author: Tamara Atkin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-17

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1317079892

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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.