Entertaining Uncertainty In The Early Modern Theater

Author : Lauren Robertson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 100922512X
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater written by Lauren Robertson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lauren Robertson's original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater's representational practices, Robertson uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of playgoing experience in this period. Doubt was not merely the purview of Hamlet and other onstage characters, but was in fact constitutive of spectators' imaginative participation in performance. Within a culture in the midst of extreme epistemological upheaval, the commercial theater licensed spectators' suspension among opposed possibilities, transforming dubiety itself into exuberantly enjoyable, spectacular show. Robertson shows that the playhouse was a site for the entertainment of uncertainty in a double sense: its pleasures made the very trial of unknowing possible.

Author : Ronda Arab
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317690699
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater written by Ronda Arab and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.

Author : Allison K. Deutermann
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030523322
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Publicity and the Early Modern Stage written by Allison K. Deutermann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity’s production. The men and women associated with playing—not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions—introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.

Author : Eric Dunnum
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351252631
Total Pages : 498 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London written by Eric Dunnum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-18 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience. This study analyses how, out of anxiety that unruly audiences would destroy the nascent industry of professional drama in England, playwrights sought to limit the effect that their plays could have on the audience. They tried to construct playgoing through their drama in the hopes of creating a less-reactive, more pensive, and controlled playgoer. The result was the radical experimentation in dramaturgy that, in part, defines Renaissance drama. Written for scholars of Early Modern and Renaissance Drama and Theatre, Theatre History, and Early Modern and Renaissance History, this book calls for a new focus on the local economic concerns of the theatre companies as a way to understand the motivation behind the drama of early modern London.

Author : Allison P. Hobgood
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781107784987
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England written by Allison P. Hobgood and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England examines the emotional effect of stage performance on the minds of the early modern theatre audience.

Author : Jeremy Lopez
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139436678
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama written by Jeremy Lopez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-12-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Besides providing readings of plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, it also places Shakespeare emphatically within his own theatrical context, and focuses on the relationship between the demanding repertory system of the time and the conventions and content of the plays. Lopez argues that the limitations of the relatively bare stage and non-naturalistic mode of early modern theatre would have made the potential for failure very great, and he proposes that understanding this potential for failure is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on stage. The book offers perspectives on familiar conventions such as the pun, the aside and the expository speech; and it works toward a definition of early modern theatrical genres based on the relationship between these well-known conventions and the incoherent experience of early modern theatrical narratives.

Author : Joe Falocco
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843842416
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reimagining Shakespeare's Playhouse written by Joe Falocco and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous attempts have been made in the modern and postmodern era to recreate the staging conventions of Shakespeare's theatre, from William Poel to the founders of the New Globe. This volume examines the work of these directors, analyzing their practical successes and failures; it also engages with the ideological critiques of early modern staging advanced by scholars such as W.B. Worthen and Ric Knowles. The author argues that rather than indulging in archaism for its own sake, the movement looked backward in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century. The book begins with a re-examination of the conventional view of Poel as an antiquarian crank. Subsequent chapters are devoted to Harley Granville Barker and Nugent Monck; the author argues that while Barker's major contribution was the dubious achievement of establishing the movement's reputation as an essentially literary phenomenon, Monck took the first tentative steps toward an architectural reimagining of modern performance space, an advance which led to later triumphs in early modern staging. The book than traces the sporadic and irregular development of Tyrone Guthrie's commitment to early modern practices. The final chapter looks at how competing historical theories of playhouse design influenced the construction of the Globe, while the conclusion discusses the ongoing potential of early modern staging in the new millennium.

Author : Evelyn Tribble
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472576039
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre written by Evelyn Tribble and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What skills did Shakespeare's actors bring to their craft? How do these skills differ from those of contemporary actors? Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body examines the 'toolkit' of the early modern player and suggests new readings of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of their many skills. Theatre is an ephemeral medium. Little remains to us of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: some printed texts, scattered documents and records, and a few scraps of description, praise, and detraction. Because most of what survives are printed playbooks, students of English theatre find it easy to forget that much of what happened on the early modern stage took place within the gaps of written language: the implicit or explicit calls for fights, dances, military formations, feats of physical skill, song, and clowning. Theatre historians and textual editors have often ignored or denigrated such moments, seeing them merely as extraneous amusements or signs that the text has been 'corrupted' by actors. This book argues that recapturing a positive account of the skills and expertise of the early modern players will result in a more capacious understanding of the nature of theatricality in the period.

Author : Douglas Bruster
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134313705
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre written by Douglas Bruster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces, authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way, prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders of cultural practice and perception. Close readings of prologues by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays' socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and action.

Author : Evelyn B. Tribble
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781472576064
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre written by Evelyn B. Tribble and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: