This collection of essays explores the material, economic and dramatic implications of stage properties in early modern English drama. The essays in this volume, written by a team of distinguished scholars in the field, offer valuable insights and historical evidence concerning the forms of production, circulation and exchange that brought such diverse properties as sacred garments, household furnishings, pawned objects, and even false beards onto the stage.
This title presents new evidence about the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists composed their plays and the degree to which they participated in the dissemination of their texts to theatrical audiences.
This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.
The late sixteenth-century penal debt bond, which allowed an unsatisfied creditor to seize the body of his debtor, set in motion a series of precedents that would shape the legal, philosophical, and moral issue of property-in-person in England and America for centuries. Focusing on this historical juncture at which debt litigation was not merely an aspect of society but seemed to engulf it completely, Of Bondage examines a culture that understood money and the body of the borrower as comparable forms of property that impinged on one another at the moment of default. Amanda Bailey shows that the early modern theater, itself dependent on debt bonds, was well positioned to stage the complex ethical issues raised by a system of forfeiture that registered as a bodily event. While plays about debt like The Merchant of Venice and The Custom of the Country did not use the language of political philosophy, they were artistically and financially invested in exploring freedom as a function of possession. By revealing dramatic literature's heretofore unacknowledged contribution to the developing narrative of possessed persons, Amanda Bailey not only deepens our understanding of creditor-debtor relations in the period but also sheds new light on the conceptual conditions for the institutions of indentured servitude and African slavery. Of Bondage is vital not only for students and scholars of English literature but also for those interested in British and colonial legal history, the history of human rights, and the sociology of economics.
This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare’s poems, problem comedies and late plays contains original essays on Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, "Venus and Adonis", "The Rape of Lucrece", and "The Sonnets", as well as Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
The last two decades have witnessed a profound change in the way we receive the literary texts of early modern England. One could call this a move from 'text' to 'culture'. Put briefly, earlier critics tended to focus on literary texts, strictly conceived: plays, poems, prose fictions, essays. Since the mid-1980s, however, it has been just as likely for critics to speak of the 'culture' of early modern England, even when they do so in conjunction with analysis of literary texts. This 'cultural turn' has clearly enriched the way in which we read the texts of early modern England, but the interdisciplinary practices involved have frequently led critics to make claims about materials - and about the 'culture' these materials appear to embody - that exceed those materials' representativeness. Shakespeare and the Question of Culture addresses the central issue of 'culture' in early modern studies through both literary history and disciplinary critique. Douglas Bruster argues that the 'culture' literary critiques investigate through the works of Shakespeare and other writers is largely a literary culture, and he examines what this necessary limitation of the scope of 'cultural studies' means for the discipline of early modern studies.
This volume presents foundational and representative essays of the last half century on theatre performance practice during the period 1580 to 1750. The particular focus is on the nature of playing spaces, staging, acting and audience response in professional theatre and the selection of previously published research articles and book chapters includes significant works on topics such as Shakespearean staging, French and Spanish theatre audiences, the challenging aspects of the evolution of Italian renaissance acting practice, and the ’hidden’ dimensions of performance. The essays provide coherent transnational coverage as well as detailed treatments of their individual topics. Considerations of theatre practice in Italy, Spain and France, as well as England, place Shakespeare’s theatre in its European context to reveal surprising commonalities and salient differences in the performance practice of early modern Europe’s major professional theatres. This volume is an indispensable reference work for university libraries, lecturers, researchers and practitioners and offers a coherent overview of early modern comparative performance practice, and a deeper understanding of the field’s major topics and developments.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published every year in a hardcover edition. Each volume contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres as well as substantial reviews of books and essays dealing with medieval and early modern English drama. Volume 17 is specially commissioned to celebrate the scholarship and career of Leeds Barroll, the founding Editor of MaRDiE. Its contents mirror Barroll's many contributions to the study of Shakespeare, the drama, and royal and aristocratic patronage in early modern England.