These essays apply the postmodernist theory of intertextuality to romantic drama of the English Renaissance, including work by Heywood, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, and especially Shakespeare. Placing the plays into dynamic relation with a wide variety of literary, cultural, and political 'intertexts' causes them to signify in ways not previously appreciated, as well as to define neglected features of the staged romance of the period. Equally important is the development of intertextuality as a critical methodology with a particular affinity for the genre and the period.
It is widely accepted that English Renaissance drama owes its extraordinary richness and variety to the blending of elements originating from the medieval heritage and classical and Italian dramatic traditions. This grafting of the "Italian world" onto the English Renaissance goes far beyond the conventional research of the literary sources. The articles in this collection explore English Renaissance drama through new and challenging aspects of influence and through investigations into classical and Italian theater. The volume moves from early Elizabethan to late Jacobean drama. The area of research ranges from New Classical Comedy to commedia erudita, from the Renaissance theory of tragedy and tragicomedy to the birth of pastoral drama and beyond.
Textual Intercourse proposes that the language and practice of writing plays in early modern England was inextricably linked to languages and practices of eroticism, sexuality and reproduction. Jeffrey Masten reads a range of early modern materials - burial records, contemporary biographical anecdotes and theatrical records, essays, conduct books and poems; the printed apparatus of published plays, and the plays themselves - to illustrate the ways in which writing for the theatre shifted from a model of homoerotic collaboration toward one of singular authorship on a patriarchal-absolutist model. Plays and collections of plays by Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Fletcher, Beaumont and Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, and others, are considered. Textual Intercourse illustrate the ways in which methods attuned to sexuality and gender can illuminate more traditional questions of authorship, attribution, textual editing and intellectual property.
Shakespeare's unique status has made critics reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which some of his plays are the outcome of adaptation. In Shakespeare's Stage Traffic Janet Clare re-situates Shakespeare's dramaturgy within the flourishing and competitive theatrical trade of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She demonstrates how Shakespeare worked with materials which had already entered the dramatic tradition, and how, in the spirit of Renaissance theory, he moulded and converted them to his own use. The book challenges the critical stance that views the Shakespeare canon as essentially self-contained, moves beyond the limitations of generic studies and argues for a more conjoined critical study of early modern plays. Each chapter focuses on specific plays and examines the networks of influence, exchange and competition which characterised stage traffic between playwrights, including Marlowe, Jonson and Fletcher. Overall, the book addresses multiple perspectives relating to authorship and text, performance and reception.
Newly available in paperback, this collection of essays, written by distinguished international scholars, focuses on the structural influence of Italian literature, culture and society at large on Shakespeare's dramatic canon. Exploring recent methodological trends coming from Anglo-American new historicism and cultural materialism and innovative analyses of intertextuality, the volume's four thematic sections deal with 'Theory and practice', 'Culture and tradition', 'Text and ideology' and 'Stage and spectacle'.In their own views and critical perspectives, the individual chapters throw fresh light on the dramatist's pliable technique of dramatic construction and break new ground in the field of influence studies and intertextuality as a whole.A rich bibliography of secondary literature and a detailed index round off the volume.
Applying recent developments in new historicism and cultural materialism - along with the new perspectives opened up by the current debate on intertextuality and the construction of the theatrical text - the essays collected here reconsider the pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on early modern English drama. The volume focuses strongly on Shakespeare but also includes contributions on Marston, Middleton, Ford, Brome, Aretino, and other early modern dramatists. The pervasive influence of Italian culture, literature, and traditions on the European Renaissance, it is argued here, offers a valuable opportunity to study the intertextual dynamics that contributed to the construction of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical canon. In the specific area of theatrical discourse, the drama of the early modern period is characterized by the systematic appropriation of a complex Italian iconology, exploited both as the origin of poetry and art and as the site of intrigue, vice, and political corruption. Focusing on the construction and the political implications of the dramatic text, this collection analyses early modern English drama within the context of three categories of cultural and ideological appropriation: the rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of the English theatrical tradition in its iconic, thematic, historical, and literary aspects.
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, language: English, abstract: The concerns of civilized human society from the beginning on until our days have not changed much. The basic problems of mankind and therefore the basic topics literature was written about are religion, love, family and war. English Renaissance drama is no exception to that. One of the most fascinating genres of Shakespeare’s contemporaries is the Revenge Tragedy. It combines revenge plots with love matters and confronts all this with the structure and beliefs of society. One of the motifs the Revenge Tragedy depends on in order to remain absorbing for the audience is the motif of romantic love. Hence this will be the topic of the paper at hand. Further on I will discuss the different aspects of romantic love and analyse their status in Renaissance society and also the representations of this aspects in three of the most important Revenge Tragedies of that time. At first I will look on how love was seen in Renaissance society, and in which way matters of marriage were settled. This topic will be regarded deeper in the second chapter, where the approach to love and marriage will be exemplified on the tragedies. The problem of marriage, particularly unequal and secret marriage will be analysed in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Afterwards I am going to compare the play to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and see how Kyd handled the Problem of unequal relationships. In chapter 3.3 one of the most important plays in literary history will be analysed on the love relationships of its main characters. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet the romance between the Prince of Denmark and the fair Ophelia is of highest interest to the literary critic. Well, naturally the motif of romantic love does not only include marriage and interpersonal relationships, but also the question of sexuality is quite important. In this paper, I will discuss the dealing with all these topics in the Renaissance tragedies by working closely with the plays in question. As will be found out in the course of the discussion, romantic love, with its different aspects is a crucial motif to every successful Revenge Tragedy.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing? In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time—the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel—the explosive, world-changing potential—back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.
A popular and influential play from its first performance in 1611 until the early eighteenth century, 'A King and No King' helped establish tragicomedy as the seventeenth century's favoured dramatic genre, and Beaumont and Fletcher as leading playwrights of the day.Accompanying this newly edited text, an introduction explores the play's sources, both literary and dramatic, and offers a thorough reconsideration of its relation to its social and political context, and contemporary issues of royal absolutism, good governance, and the political role of the aristocracy. In addition, the introduction provides the fullest available account of 'A King and No King''s stage history, tracing the shifts in cultural mores that eroded its popularity and ultimately consigned it to the study rather than the stage. This fully annotated edition encourages an appreciation of the play's very real virtues and will appeal to theatre professionals as well as to students of Renaissance drama.
This collection recovers the continuities between two modes of romance that have long been separated from one another in critical discourse: the prose fictions that early moderns often referred to as romances, and Shakespeare's late plays, which have often been termed 'romances' since Dowden.
