Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England
Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England

Author: Tiffany Stern

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-11-14

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1350051357

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This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Rethinking Theatrical Documents brings together fifteen major scholars to analyse and theorise the documents, lost and found, that produced a play in Shakespeare's England. Showing how the playhouse frantically generated paratexts, it explores a rich variety of entangled documents, some known and some unknown: from before the play (drafts, casting lists, actors' parts); during the play (prologues, epilogues, title-boards); and after the play (playbooks, commonplace snippets, ballads) – though 'before', 'during' and 'after' intertwine in fascinating ways. By using collective intervention to rethink both theatre history and book history, it provides new ways of understanding plays critically, interpretatively, editorially, practically and textually.

Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England
Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England

Author: Tiffany Stern

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1350051349

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This collection brings together major scholars to introduce, analyze and theorize the rich variety of entangled documents produced in the playhouse before, during and after performance. As it provides new material and new ways of thinking about that material, it informs and complicates ideas about play-construction, performance, revision and reception, redefining the relationship between play, text and performance.

Documents of Performance in Early Modern England
Documents of Performance in Early Modern England

Author: Tiffany Stern

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-09-17

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1139482971

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As well as 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were known as 'play-patchers' because their texts were made from separate documents. This book is the first to consider all the papers created by authors and theatres by the time of the opening performance, recovering types of script not previously known to have existed. With chapters on plot-scenarios, arguments, playbills, prologues and epilogues, songs, staged scrolls, backstage-plots and parts, it shows how textually distinct production was from any single unified book. And, as performance documents were easily lost, relegated or reused, the story of a play's patchy creation also becomes the story of its co-authorship, cuts, revisions and additions. Using a large body of fresh evidence, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England brings a wholly new reading to printed and manuscript playbooks of the Shakespearean period, redefining what a play, and what a playwright, actually is.

Shakespeare's Political Imagination
Shakespeare's Political Imagination

Author: Philip Goldfarb Styrt

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-11-04

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1350173991

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Shakespeare's Political Imagination argues that to better understand Shakespeare's plays it is essential to look at the historicism of setting: how the places and societies depicted in the plays were understood in the period when they were written. This book offers us new readings of neglected critical moments in key plays, such as Malcolm's final speech in Macbeth and the Duke's inaction in The Merchant of Venice, by investigating early modern views about each setting and demonstrating how the plays navigate between those contemporary perspectives. Divided into three parts, this book explores Shakespeare's historicist use of medieval Britain and Scotland in King John and Macbeth; ancient Rome in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus; and Renaissance Europe through Venice and Vienna in The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Measure for Measure. Philip Goldfarb Styrt argues that settings are a powerful component in Shakespeare's worlds that not only function as physical locations, but are a mechanism through which he communicates the political and social orders of the plays. Reading the plays in light of these social and political contexts reveals Shakespeare's dramatic method: how he used competing cultural narratives about other cultures to situate the action of his plays. These fresh insights encourage us to move away from overly localized or universalized readings of the plays and re-discover hidden moments and meanings that have long been obscured.

Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare's Time
Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare's Time

Author: Roslyn L. Knutson

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9783030368692

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As early modernists with an interest in the literary culture of Shakespeare's time, we work in a field that contains many significant losses: of texts, of contextual information, of other forms of cultural activity. No account of early modern literary culture is complete without acknowledgment of these lacunae, and although lost drama has become a topic of increasing interest in Shakespeare studies, it is important to recognize that loss is not restricted to play-texts alone. Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare's Time broadens the scope of the scholarly conversation about loss beyond drama and beyond London. It aims to develop further models and techniques for thinking about lost plays, but also of other kinds of lost early modern works, and even lost persons associated with literary and theatrical circles. Chapters examine textual corruption, oral preservation, quantitative analysis, translation, and experiments in "verbatim theater", plus much more.

Shakespeare / Text
Shakespeare / Text

Author: Claire M. L. Bourne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-07-29

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1350128163

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Shakespeare / Text sets new agendas for the study and use of the Shakespearean text. Written by 20 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary – such as book/theatre, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy – that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform and edit Shakespeare today. Drawing on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, theatre studies and literary criticism, the collection as a whole proposes that our understanding of Shakespeare – and early modern drama more broadly – changes radically when 'either/or' approaches to the Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare / Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer new, portable methods of treating 'the text', in its myriad instantiations, that will be useful to scholars, editors, theatre practitioners, teachers and librarians.

The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama
The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Author: Michelle M. Dowd

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 135016187X

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How does our understanding of early modern performance, culture and identity change when we decentre Shakespeare? And how might a more inclusive approach to early modern drama help enable students to discuss a range of issues, including race and gender, in more productive ways? Underpinned by these questions, this collection offers a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on drama in Shakespeare's England, mapping the variety of approaches to the context and work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By paying attention to repertory, performance in and beyond playhouses, modes of performance, and lost and less-studied plays, the handbook reshapes our critical narratives about early modern drama. Chapters explore early modern drama through a range of cultural contexts and approaches, from material culture and emotion studies to early modern race work and new directions in disability and trans studies, as well as contemporary performance. Running through the collection is a shared focus on contemporary concerns, with contributors exploring how race, religion, environment, gender and sexuality animate 16th- and 17th-century drama and, crucially, the questions we bring to our study, teaching and research of it. The volume includes a ground-breaking assessment of the chronology of early modern drama, a survey of resources and an annotated bibliography to assist researchers as they pursue their own avenues of inquiry. Combining original research with an account of the current state of play, The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama will be an invaluable resource both for experienced scholars and for those beginning work in the field.