"The Induction in Elizabethan Drama studies with some sympathy the Elizabethan dramatist's use of a device that often takes particular cognizance of the audience and that, in a modern sense, may violate dramatic illusion. For convenience, Dr. Greenfield has used the Elizabethan term induction to cover the separate dramatic materials sometimes employed to launch the play proper.".
Ranging from the earliest drama to the theater of the 1980's this encyclopedia includes coverage of national drama and theater around the world, theater companies, and musical comedy. Arrangement of the 1,300 entries is alphabetically by name or subject with nearly 950 of these devoted to individual playwrights and their works.
The first edition of this book formed the basis of the modern approach to Elizabethan poetic drama as a performing art, an approach pursued in subsequent volumes by Professor Bradbrook. Its influence has also extended to other fields; it has been studied by Grigori Kozintsev and Sergei Eisenstein for instance. Conventions of open stage, stylized plot and characters, and actors' traditions of presentation are realted to the special expectations which a rhetorical training produced in the listeners. The general discussion of tragic conventions is followed by individual studies of how these were used by Marlowe, Tourneur, Webster and Middleton. For this second edition, Professor Bradbrook has revised her material and written a new introduction. A new final chapter on performance and characterization describes the conventions of role-playing. Dramatists before and after Shakespeare are compared with him in their methods of showing a complex identity on stage. This chapter also considers the work of Marston, Chapman and Ford in relation to the themes and conventions studied in earlier chapters.
Presents critical essays which discuss the writers and literary works of the Elizabethan era, and includes a chronology of the cultural, political, and literary events of the period.
