Originally published in 1980, this was the first study to make use of the Lord Chamberlain's files on English stage censorship. Dramatic censorship is shown to be a significant index of the Victorian age and the book fills an important gap in the knowledge and understanding not only of Victorian theatre, but of Victorian manners and attitudes.
This book investigates the complex interactions, through experiencing drama, of readers and audiences in the English Renaissance. Around 1500 an absolute majority of population was illiterate. Henry VIII’s religious reformation changed this cultural structure of society. ‘The Act for the Advancement of True Religion’ of 1543, which prohibited the people belonging to the lower classes of society as well as women from reading the Bible, rather suggests that there already existed a number of these folks actively engaged in reading. The Act did not ban the works of Chaucer and Gower and stories of men’s lives – good reading for them. The successive sovereigns’ educational policies also contributed to rising literacy. This trend was speeded up by London’s growing population which invited the rise of commercial playhouses since 1567. Every citizen saw on average about seven performances every year: that is, about three per cent of London’s population saw a performance a day. From 1586 onwards merchants’ appearance in best-seller literature began to increase while stage representation of reading/writing scenes also increased and stimulated audiences towards reading. This was spurred by standardisation of the printing format of playbooks in the early 1580s and play-minded readers went to playbooks, eventually to create a class of playbook readers. Late in the 1590s, at last, playbooks matched with prose writings in ratio to all publications. Parts I and II of this book discuss these topics in numerical terms as much as possible and Part III discusses some monumental characteristics of contemporary readers of Chapman, Ford, Marston and Shakespeare.
This pioneering collection of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama has now been updated to include more early material, plus Mary Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antony, John Marston’s The Malcontent and Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens. Second edition of this pioneering collection of works of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama. Covers the full sweep of dramatic performances, including State progresses and Court masques. Contains material useful for courses on women playwrights or women in Renaissance drama, including Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling. Includes plays and pageants not anthologised elsewhere, such as the coronation entries of Elizabeth I and Queen Anne, and Thomas Heywood’s ‘A Woman Killed with Kindness’. For the second edition more early material has been added, such as Noah and The Second Shepherd’s Play. The anthology now also includes Mary Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antony, John Marston’s The Malcontent and Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens.
Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tones of voice especially—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. However, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.
Contextualising the emergence of literary and aesthetic modernism and cultural nationalism within the popularity of the Renaissance, this volume offers new insights into high and low culture, as well as historical periodization.
Twenty-six original essays by leading theorists and historians of the pre-seventeenth-century English stage chart a paradigmatic shift within the field. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on individual authors, the contributors to this storehouse of new historical information and critical insight explore the place of the stage within the larger society, as well as issues of performance and physical space, providing an innovative approach to both literary studies and cultural history.
