Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater focuses on political, social, and aesthetic issues to reveal the enormous influence of civic celebration on Renaissance theater. Ranging across Shakespeare's canon and including the work of his fellow playwrights, this collection of twelve essays considers tournaments, royal entries, Lord Mayor's Shows, funeral processions progress entertainments, court masques, and more.
Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins>
Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing more than three hundred pages of essays and studies by critics from both hemispheres.
In this study of Shakespeare's visual culture Frederick Kiefer looks at the personified characters created by Shakespeare in his plays, his walking, talking abstractions. These include Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter's Tale, Spring and Winter in Love's Labour's Lost, Revenge in Titus Andronicus, and the deities in the late plays. All these personae take physical form on the stage: the actors performing the roles wear distinctive attire and carry appropriate props. The book seeks to reconstruct the appearance of Shakespeare's personified characters; to explain the symbolism of their costumes and props; and to assess the significance of these symbolic characters for the plays in which they appear. To accomplish this reconstruction, Kiefer brings together a wealth of visual and literary evidence including engravings, woodcuts, paintings, drawings, tapestries, emblems, civic pageants, masques, poetry and plays. The book contains over forty illustrations of personified characters in Shakespeare's time.
The essays collected here explore the representation of contemporary cartographic knowledge within a variety of English Renaissance dramatic texts. Including a preface and introduction that contextualize English cartographic awareness in the late sixteenth century, Playing the Globe provides a wide-ranging exploration of the rich variety of mental maps that shaped England's attitudes toward itself and others and continues to affect the ways in which the Anglo-American world imagines itself.
A comprehensive companion to 'The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton', providing detailed introductions to and full editorial apparatus for the works themselves as well as a wealth of information about Middleton's historical and literary context.
Shakespearean Entrances offer a systematic study of entrances and exits on the Shakespearean stage. Elizabethan playwrights and players not only routinely handled these movements but they also used them to bring about various effects. Through analyzing the surviving play-texts, the author attempts to identify the unspoken but standard rules that lay behind the minimal and conventionalized stage directions 'Enter' and 'Exit'/'Exeunt'. The findings provide means by which to recover effects and meanings that the original audience would have appreciated.
The connection between Renaissance ideas about the character of individual nations and the presentation of stage characters of various nationalities in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is examined in this volume.
