Widows And Suitors In Early Modern English Comedy

Author : Jennifer Panek
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 113945594X
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy written by Jennifer Panek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The courtship and remarriage of a rich widow was a popular motif in early modern comic theatre. Jennifer Panek brings together a wide variety of texts, from ballads and jest-books to sermons and court records, to examine the staple widow of comedy in her cultural context and to examine early modern attitudes to remarriage. She persuasively challenges the critical tendency to see the stereotype of the lusty widow as a tactic to dissuade women from second marriages, arguing instead that it was deployed to enable her suitors to regain their masculinity, under threat from the dominant, wealthier widow. The theatre, as demonstrated by Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher and others, was the prime purveyor of a fantasy in which a young man's sexual mastery of a widow allowed him to seize the economic opportunity she offered.

Author : Asuka Kimura
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501513893
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage written by Asuka Kimura and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-01-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

Author : Johanna Rickman
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351921223
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Love, Lust, and License in Early Modern England written by Johanna Rickman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on cases of extramarital sex, Johanna Rickman investigates fornication, adultery and bastard bearing among the English nobility during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Since members of the nobility were not generally brought before the ecclesiastical courts, which had jurisdiction over other citizens' sexual offences, Rickman's sources include collections of family papers (primarily letters), state papers, and literary texts (prescriptive manuals, love sonnets, satirical verse, and prose romances), as well as legal documents. Rickman explores how attitudes towards illicit sex varied greatly throughout the period of study, roughly 1560 - 1630. Whole some viewed it as a minor infraction, others, directed by a religious moral code, viewed it as a serious sin. seeks to illuminate the place of noblewomenin early modern aristocratic culture, both as historical subjects (considering personal circumstances) and as a social group (considering social position and status).She argues that two different gender ideals were in operation simultaneously: one primarily religious ideal, which lauded female silence, obedience, and chastity, and another, more secular ideal, which required noblewomen to be beautiful, witty, brave, and receptive to the games of courtly love.

Author : Lisa Hopkins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317100662
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation of the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm and/or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the audience?

Author : Ezra Horbury
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843845423
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Prodigality in Early Modern Drama written by Ezra Horbury and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.

Author : Andrew McConnell Stott
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350187704
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age written by Andrew McConnell Stott and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together scholars with a wide range of expertise across the early modern period, this volume explores the rich field of early modern comedy in all its variety. It argues that early modern comedy was shaped by a series of cultural transformations that included the emergence of the entertainment industry, the rise of the professional comedian, extended commentaries on the nature of comedy and laughter, and the development of printed jestbooks. It was the prime site from which to satirize a rapidly-changing world and explore the formation of new social relations around questions of gender, authority, identity, and commerce, amongst others. Yet even as it reacted to the novel and the new, comedy also served as a receptacle for the celebration of older social rituals such as May games and seasonal festivities. The result was a complex and contested mix of texts, performances, and concepts providing a deep tradition that abides to this day. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to early modern comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Author : Peter Jones
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443886610
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws written by Peter Jones and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its focus on poverty and welfare in England between the seventeenth and later nineteenth centuries, this book addresses a range of questions that are often thought of as essentially “modern”: How should the state support those in work but who do not earn enough to get by? How should communities deal with in-migrants and immigrants who might have made only the lightest contribution to the economic and social lives of those communities? What basket of welfare rights ought to be attached to the status of citizen? How might people prove, maintain and pass on a sense of “belonging” to a place? How should and could the poor navigate a welfare system which was essentially discretionary? What agency could the poor have and how did ordinary officials understand their respective duties to the poor and to taxpayers? And how far was the state successful in introducing, monitoring and maintaining a uniform welfare system which matched the intent and letter of the law? This volume takes these core questions as a starting point. Synthesising a rich body of sources ranging from pauper letters through to legal cases in the highest courts in the land, this book offers a re-evaluation of the Old and New Poor Laws. Challenging traditional chronological dichotomies, it evaluates and puts to use new sources, and questions a range of long-standing assumptions about the experience of being poor. In doing so, the compelling voices of the poor move to centre stage and provide a human dimension to debates about rights, obligations and duties under the Old and New Poor Laws.

Author : John R. Decker
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000435490
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Audience and Reception in the Early Modern Period written by John R. Decker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern audiences, readerships, and viewerships were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few variables) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, dramatic and musical performances, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which each of these were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which authors, poets, artists, preachers, theologians, playwrights, and performers took account of and encoded pluriform potential audiences, readers, and viewers in their works, and how these varied parties encountered and responded to these works. The contributors here investigate these complex interactions through a variety of critical and methodological lenses.

Author : Allison Levy
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351904485
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence written by Allison Levy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood.

Author : A. Gordon
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137294922
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing Early Modern London written by A. Gordon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Early Modern London explores how urban community in London was experienced, imagined and translated into textual form. Ranging from previously unstudied manuscripts to major works by Middleton, Stow and Whitney, it examines how memory became a key cultural battleground as rites of community were appropriated in creative ways.