English Stage Comedy 1490 1990

Author : Alexander Leggatt
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134657897
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book English Stage Comedy 1490-1990 written by Alexander Leggatt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-31 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2004. English stage comedy has weathered centuries of social and theatrical change. How did it survive? English Stage Comedy 1490–1990 is a unique and beautifully written study of the comedy of the English stage from the Tudor period to the late twentieth century. Organized thematically, it shows how this remarkably enduring genre has dealt with the tensions of social life, using its conventions as tools for social inquiry. Through an examination of comedy Alexander Leggatt demonstrates that an approach through genre, neglected in recent criticism, can have much to say about our current concerns with the relations between literature and society. English Stage Comedy 1490–1990 surveys five centuries of classic comic drama, focusing on major playwrights such as: Shakespeare, Jonson, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, Coward, Orton, Ayckbourn and many lesser-known figures.

Author : Heather Hirschfeld
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019104346X
Total Pages : 592 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy written by Heather Hirschfeld and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. All the chapters offer contemporary perspectives on the plays even as they gesture to critical traditions, and they illuminate as well as challenge some of our most cherished expectations about the ways in which Shakespearean comedy affects its audiences. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

Author : Barbara Korte
Publisher : transcript Verlag
ISBN 13 : 383942593X
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History and Humour written by Barbara Korte and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One tends to associate history with serious modes of presentation rather than with humorous ones. Yet Clio also smiles and laughs out loud: Comic renderings of historical events and figures have made a significant contribution to »popular« history since around 1800. This volume offers case studies on history and humour in Britain and the US from 1800 to the present, discussing various historical topics, actors and events from the Middle Ages to the recent past.

Author : W. Demastes
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230612423
Total Pages : 203 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Comedy Matters written by W. Demastes and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-05-12 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy Matters traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind s darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, Comedy Matters demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

Author : Anthony W. Johnson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131716329X
Total Pages : 447 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres written by Anthony W. Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences? And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship, theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights’ professional and linguistic networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies. In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances of hall playhouses, court masques, women’s drama, country-house theatricals, and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.

Author : Jonathan Goossen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351658689
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy written by Jonathan Goossen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy relates new understandings of Aristotle’s dramatic theory to the comedy of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Typically, scholars of Renaissance drama have treated Aristotle’s theory only as a possible historical influence on Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s drama, focusing primarily on their tragedies. Yet recent classical scholarship has undone important misconceptions about Aristotle’s Poetics held by early modern commentators and fleshed out the theory of comedy latent within it. By first synthesizing these developments and then treating them as an interpretive theory, rather than simply an historical influence, this book demonstrates a remarkable consonance between Aristotelian principles of plot and its emotional effect, on the one hand, and the comedy of Shakespeare and Jonson, on the other. In doing so, it also reveals surprising similarities between these seemingly divergent dramatists.

Author : Eric Weitz
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316154289
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy written by Eric Weitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Laughter', says Eric Weitz, 'may be considered one of the most extravagant physical effects one person can have on another without touching them'. But how do we identify something which is meant to be comic, what defines something as 'comedy', and what does this mean for the way we enter the world of a comic text? Addressing these issues, and many more, this is a 'how to' guide to reading comedy from the pages of a dramatic text, with relevance to anything from novels and newspaper columns to billboards and emails. The book enables you to enhance your grasp of the comic through familiarity with characteristic structures and patterns, referring to comedy in literature, film and television throughout. Perfect for drama and literature students, this Introduction explores a genre which affects the everyday lives of us all, and will therefore also capture the interest of anyone who loves to laugh.

Author : International Shakespeare Association. World Congress
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
ISBN 13 : 9780874138160
Total Pages : 476 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare and the Mediterranean written by International Shakespeare Association. World Congress and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's career-long fascination with the Mediterranean made the association a natural one for this first World Shakespeare Congress of the Third Millennium. The plenary lectures and selected papers in this volume represent some of the best contemporary thought and writing on Shakespeare, in the ranging plenary lectures by Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare's islands and the Muslim connection, Michael Coveney's on the late Sir John Gielgud, Robert Ellrodt's on Shakespeare's sonnets and Montaigne's essays, Stephen Orgel's on Shakespeare's own Shylock, and Marina Warner's on Shakespeare's fairy-tale uses of magic. Also included in the volume's several sections are original pagers selected from special sessions and seminars by other distinguished writers, including Jean E. Howard, Gary Taylor, and Richard Wilson. Tom Clayton is Regents' Professor of English Language and Literature and chair of the Classical Civilization Program at the University of Minnesota. Susan Brock is Head of Library and Information Resources at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham. Vicente Fores is Associate Profe

Author : Andrew Stott
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134424108
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Comedy written by Andrew Stott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-26 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than attempting to produce a totalising definition of 'the comic', this volume focuses on the significance of comic 'events' through study of various theoretical methodologies, including deconstruction, psychoanalysis and gender theory.

Author : Richard F. Hardin
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1683931297
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Plautus and the English Renaissance of Comedy written by Richard F. Hardin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-11-08 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifteenth-century discovery of Plautus’s lost comedies brought him, for the first time since antiquity, the status of a major author both on stage and page. It also led to a reinvention of comedy and to new thinking about its art and potential. This book aims to define the unique contribution of Plautus, detached from his fellow Roman dramatist Terence, and seen in the context of that European revival, first as it took shape on the Continent. The heart of the book, with special focus on English comedy ca. 1560 to 1640, analyzes elements of Plautine technique during the period, as differentiated from native and Terentian, considering such points of comparison as dialogue, asides, metadrama, observation scenes, characterization, and atmosphere. This is the first book to cover this ground, raising such questions as: How did comedy rather suddenly progress from the interludes and brief plays of the early sixteenth century to longer, more complex plays? What did “Plautus” mean to playwrights and readers of the time? Plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton are foregrounded, but many other comedies provide illustration and support.