Renaissance Drama, an annual interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore the traditional canon of drama, the significance of performance, broadly construed, to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance. Volume 38 includes essays that explore topics in early modern drama ranging from Shakespeare’s Jewish questions in The Merchant of Venice and the gender of rhetoric in Shakespeare’s sonnets and Jonson’s plays to improvisation in the commedia dell’arte and the rebirth of tragedy in 1940 Germany.
Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theatre, and performance.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing essays and studies as well as book reviews of the many significant books and essays dealing with the cultural history of medieval and early modern England as expressed by and realized in its drama exclusive of Shakespeare.
Introduces the conclusions of recent scholarship and research into theatrical conditions, conventions and concepts in the time of Shakespeare. The book begins with a discussion of the origins of early modern English drama and of the theatres that were built for it. Attitudes to theatre and to players, and what audiences expected of both, are explored in the contexts of the constraints of the acting space and the political culture. The book then looks at the structure and dynamics of the theatrical companies before concluding with a discussion of the genres of plays and the expectations of them that people (including writers) held. Appendices list brief details of the major dramatists of the time, and summarise the main historical and dramatic events.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international journal committee to the publication of essays and reviews relevant to drama and theatre history to 1642. This issue includes eight new articles and reviews of fourteen books.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an annual volume committed to the publication of essays and reviews related to drama and theatre history to 1642. Volume 30, an anniversary issue, contains eight essays, three review essays, and 12 briefer reviews of important books in the field.
Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy studies instantiations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside such fraught questions as the history of Renaissance subjectivity and individualism on the one hand and Shakespearean exceptionalism on the other, we can find that in some plays, by a range of different authors and collaborators, a conception has been evidenced of who a particular person is, and has been used to drive the action. This evidence can take into account a number of internal and external factors that might differentiate a person, and can do so drawing on the intellectual context in a number of ways. Ideas with potential to emphasize the special over the general in envisioning the person might come from training in dialectic (thesis vs hypothesis) or in rhetoric (ethopoeia), from psychological frameworks (casuistry, humor theory, and their interpenetration), or from historiography (exemplarity). But though they depicted what we would call personality only intermittently, and with assumptions different from our own about personhood, dramatists sometimes made a priority of representing the workings of a specific mind: the patterns of thought and feeling that set a person off as that person and define that person singularly rather than categorically. Some individualistic characters can be shown to emerge where we do not expect, such as with Fletcherian personae like Amintor, Arbaces, and Montaigne of The Honest Man’s Fortune; some are drawn by playwrights often uninterested in character, such as Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Jonson’s Cicero, and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck; and some appear in being constructed differently from others by the same author, as when Webster’s Bosola is set in contrast to Flamineo, and Marlowe’s Faustus is set against Barabas. But Shakespearean characters are also examined for the particular manner in which each troubles the categorical and exhibits a personality: Othello, Good Duke Humphrey, and Marc Antony. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.
This project takes the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theatre and overturns a longstanding notion about theatrical phenomenology in this period.
The Dutch were culturally ubiquitous in England during the early modern period and constituted London's largest alien population in the second half of the sixteenth century. While many sought temporary refuge from Spanish oppression in the Low Countries, others became part of a Dutch diaspora, developing their commercial, spiritual, and domestic lives in England. The category "Dutch" catalyzed questions about English self-definition that were engendered less by large-scale cultural distinctions than by uncanny similarities. Doppelgänger Dilemmas uncovers the ways England's real and imagined proximities with the Dutch played a crucial role in the making of English ethnicity. Marjorie Rubright explores the tensions of Anglo-Dutch relations that emerged in the form of puns, double entendres, cognates, homophones, copies, palimpsests, doppelgängers, and other doublings of character and kind. Through readings of London's stage plays and civic pageantry, English and Continental polyglot and bilingual dictionaries and grammars, and travel accounts of Anglo-Dutch rivalries and friendships in the Spice Islands, Rubright reveals how representations of Dutchness played a vital role in shaping Englishness in virtually every aspect of early modern social life. Her innovative book sheds new light on the literary and historical forces of similitude in an era that was so often preoccupied with ethnic and cultural difference.
