The Queen's Dumbshows
The Queen's Dumbshows

Author: Claire Sponsler

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2014-03-10

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0812209478

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No medieval writer reveals more about early English drama than John Lydgate, Claire Sponsler contends. Best known for his enormously long narrative poems The Fall of Princes and The Troy Book, Lydgate also wrote numerous verses related to theatrical performances and ceremonies. This rich yet understudied body of material includes mummings for London guildsmen and sheriffs, texts for wall hangings that combined pictures and poetry, a Corpus Christi procession, and entertainments for the young Henry VI and his mother. In The Queen's Dumbshows, Sponsler reclaims these writings to reveal what they have to tell us about performance practices in the late Middle Ages. Placing theatricality at the hub of fifteenth-century British culture, she rethinks what constituted drama in the period and explores the relationship between private forms of entertainment, such as household banquets, and more overtly public forms of political theater, such as royal entries and processions. She delineates the intersection of performance with other forms of representation such as feasts, pictorial displays, and tableaux, and parses the connections between the primarily visual and aural modes of performance and the reading of literary texts written on paper or parchment. In doing so, she has written a book of signal importance to scholars of medieval literature and culture, theater history, and visual studies.

The Experience of Poetry
The Experience of Poetry

Author: Derek Attridge

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-28

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0192569589

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Was the experience of poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—continuously available across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson's Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616? How did the pleasure afforded by the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms play a part in the lives of hearers and readers in Ancient Greece and Rome, Europe during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and Britain during the Renaissance? In tackling these questions, this book first examines the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. It moves on to deal with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the place of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. A final part investigates the experience of poetry in the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII's court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan era. Among the topics considered in this part are the importance of the printed page, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the performance of poetry in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. In tracking both continuity and change across these many centuries, the book throws fresh light on the role and importance of poetry in western culture.

The Naïve Shakespearean
The Naïve Shakespearean

Author: JOHN R. LEIGH

Publisher: Paragon Publishing

Published: 2017-09-07

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1782224556

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John R Leigh, born in Bolton, Lancashire, and educated in Cambridge, was musical, mathematical, scientific and literary. At school in the 1930s, his headmaster told him there would be no more wars and no need for more scientists. His life then ranged first from languages teacher, radar technician and RAF flight lieutenant in WWII, to marriage with a talented and literary American wife. After the war, John changed career to retrain in engineering—for a married man, a brave decision. Over the years, the keen theatre-going couple saw many diverse plays. Convinced that he had found an original approach to seeing Shakespearean dramas, he spent happy years describing and refining his thoughts: what ideas, prejudices and religious beliefs would surface in the minds of Shakespeare’s own audience, the groundlings and nobles? In our day, we cannot help but react with our own beliefs and social customs; yet in Globe Theatre, how would people have responded to seeing a ghost in the early sixteenth century? Rather differently than nowadays, John thought. (Hamlet studies form the greater part of his collected work.) Suppose you were seeing Hamlet for the first time: hence the title ‘The Naïve Shakespearean’.

Shakespeare and the Medieval World
Shakespeare and the Medieval World

Author: Helen Cooper

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-09-26

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1408138980

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Helen Cooper's unique study examines how continuations of medieval culture into the early modern period, forged Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and poet. Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century
Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

Author: Fiona Macintosh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 0192526251

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Greek and Roman epic poetry has always provided creative artists in the modern world with a rich storehouse of themes. Tim Supple and Simon Reade's 1999 stage adaptation of Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid for the RSC heralded a new lease of life for receptions of the genre, and it now routinely provides raw material for the performance repertoire of both major cultural institutions and emergent, experimental theatre companies. This volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, analysing lyric, film, dance, and opera from Europe to Asia and the Americas. What emerges most clearly is how anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world, together with the ancient precedent of Greek tragedy's reworking of epic material, explain its migration to the theatre. This move, though, was not without problems, as epic encountered the barriers imposed by neo-classicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded its broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally has rendered reinvention not only legitimate, but also deeply appropriate, opening up a range of forms and traditions within which epic themes and structures may be explored. Drawing on the expertise of specialists from the fields of classical studies, English and comparative literature, modern languages, music, dance, and theatre and performance studies, as well as from practitioners within the creative industries, the volume is able to offer an unprecedented modern and dynamic study of 'epic' content and form across myriad diverse performance arenas.

Early Modern Theatricality
Early Modern Theatricality

Author: Henry S. Turner

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2013-12

Total Pages: 637

ISBN-13: 0199641358

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Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.

Shadow and Substance
Shadow and Substance

Author: Jay Zysk

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2017-09-30

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0268102325

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Shadow and Substance is the first book to present a sustained examination of the relationship between Eucharistic controversy and English drama across the Reformation divide. In this compelling interdisciplinary study, Jay Zysk contends that the Eucharist is not just a devotional object or doctrinal crux, it also shapes a way of thinking about physical embodiment and textual interpretation in theological and dramatic contexts. Regardless of one’s specific religious identity, to speak of the Eucharist during that time was to speak of dynamic interactions between body and sign. In crossing periodic boundaries and revising familiar historical narratives, Shadow and Substance challenges the idea that the Protestant Reformation brings about a decisive shift from the flesh to the word, the theological to the poetic, and the sacred to the secular. The book also adds to studies of English drama and Reformation history by providing an account of how Eucharistic discourse informs understandings of semiotic representation in broader cultural domains. This bold study offers fresh, imaginative readings of theology, sermons, devotional books, and dramatic texts from a range of historical, literary, and religious perspectives. Each of the book’s chapters creates a dialogue between different strands of Eucharistic theology and different varieties of English drama. Spanning England’s long reformation, these plays—some religious in subject matter, others far more secular—reimagine semiotic struggles that stem from the controversies over Christ’s body at a time when these very concepts were undergoing significant rethinking in both religious and literary contexts. Shadow and Substance will have a wide appeal, especially to those interested in medieval and early modern drama and performance, literary theory, Reformation history, and literature and religion.

Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition
Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition

Author: R. D. Perry

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2024-06-11

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1512826030

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In Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, R. D. Perry reveals how poetic coteries formed and maintained the English literary tradition. Perry shows that, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edmund Spenser, the poets who bridged the medieval and early modern periods created a profusion of coterie forms as they sought to navigate their relationships with their contemporaries and to the vernacular literary traditions that preceded them. Rather than defining coteries solely as historical communities of individuals sharing work, Perry reframes them as products of authors signaling associations with one another across time and space, in life and on the page. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s associations with both his fellow writers in London and with his geographically distant French contemporaries, to Thomas Hoccleve’s emphatic insistence that he was “aqweyntid” with Chaucer even after Chaucer’s death, to John Lydgate’s formations of “virtual coteries” of a wide range of individuals alive and dead who can only truly come together on the page, the book traces how writers formed the English literary tradition by signaling social connections. By forming coteries, both real and virtual, based on shared appreciation of a literary tradition, these authors redefine what should be valued in that tradition, shaping and reshaping it accordingly. Perry shows how our notion of the English literary tradition came to be and how it could be imagined otherwise.