Staging the Blazon in Early Modern Theatre Edited by Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison Farnham, and: Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642 by Andrea Ria Stevens

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 765-770
Author(s):  
Patricia Badir
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Early English

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Early Modern English Drama ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
Critical Site

This collection of essays brings together theories of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new understandings of the history and design of early modern English drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an international team of distinguished scholars examines a wide range of games—from dicing to bowling to roleplaying to videogames—to uncover their fascinating ramifications for the stage in Shakespeare's era and our own. Foregrounding ludic elements challenges the traditional view of drama as principally mimesis, or imitation, revealing stageplays to be improvisational experiments and participatory explorations into the motive, means, and value of recreation. Delving into both canonical masterpieces and hidden gems, this innovative volume stakes a claim for play as the crucial link between games and early modern theatre, and for the early modern theatre as a critical site for unraveling the continued cultural significance and performative efficacy of gameplay today.

Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Early Modern English Drama ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
Critical Site

This collection of essays brings together theories of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new understandings of the history and design of early modern English drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an international team of distinguished scholars examines a wide range of games—from dicing to bowling to roleplaying to videogames—to uncover their fascinating ramifications for the stage in Shakespeare’s era and our own. Foregrounding ludic elements challenges the traditional view of drama as principally mimesis, or imitation, revealing stageplays to be improvisational experiments and participatory explorations into the motive, means, and value of recreation. Delving into both canonical masterpieces and hidden gems, this innovative volume stakes a claim for play as the crucial link between games and early modern theatre, and for the early modern theatre as a critical site for unraveling the continued cultural significance and performative efficacy of gameplay today.

Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Angus
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Audience Interpretation

Intelligence and in the Early Modern Theatre explores intrinsic connections between early modern intelligencers and metadrama in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It offers insight into why the early modern stage abounds with informer and intelligencer figures. Analysing both the nature of intelligence at the time and the metadrama that such characters generate, the book highlights the significance of intrigue and corruption to dramatic narrative and structure. This study of metadrama reveals some of the most fundamental questions being posed about the legitimacy of authority, authorship, and audience interpretation in this seminal era of English drama.

Drama and ceremony in early modern England: the REED project

Urban History ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 38-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally-Beth MacLean
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Stated Goal ◽  
Musical Activity ◽  
Early English

In 1976 a medieval and renaissance theatre history project was launched under the masthead Records of Early English Drama (now more familiarly known as REED). The official launch had taken two years of planning by scholars from Britain, Canada and the United States, and was given assurance for the future through a ten-year major Editorial Grant from the Canada Council. REED's stated goal – then as now – was to find, transcribe and publish evidence of dramatic, ceremonial and musical activity in Great Britain before the theatres were closed in 1642. The systematic survey undertaken would make available for analysis records relating to the evolution of English theatre from its origins in minstrelsy, through the flowering of drama in the renaissance, to the suppression first of local and then of professional entertainment under the Puritans.

scholarly journals Perambulation and Performance in Early Modern Festive Culture

Early Theatre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Woodcock
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Festive Culture ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Early English

This essay examines the performative aspect of observances and festivities associated with Rogationtide, or ‘perambulation day’, in early modern England. After considering pre- and post-Reformation Rogationtide traditions, it identifies how these occasions were an opportunity for communities and parishes to reflect upon and consolidate local boundaries and identities. It also explores how documentary evidence for perambulations broadens critical understandings of the mimetic, musical, and festive activities recorded in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, posing methodological questions about using performance as well as mimesis as a characteristic determining a record’s inclusion in a REED collection.

scholarly journals Introduction: Rethinking Performance in Early Modern England

Early Theatre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Mayne
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Current Work ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Early English

This Early Theatre ‘Issues in Review’ explores concepts of ‘performance’ in late medieval and early modern England. Responding to current work on drama, festivity and spectatorship, and to the ongoing editorial project Records of Early English Drama (REED), essays address questions such as: what constitutes performance in pre-modern contexts? where, and in what types of texts, can evidence of medieval and early modern performance be located? and what can rethinking ideas of performance and sources do for critical understanding of medieval and early modern culture and drama? [Please note this Abstract and Title are for the whole 'Issues in Review'.]

Staging Romance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Spatial Grammar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter explores the mostly overlooked history of romance on the early modern stage. Analysing the geographies of two little-known plays, Clyomon and Clamydes (1580s?) and Guy of Warwick (early 1590s?), it argues that, in its imaginative openness and its flexible staging of space, the early modern theatre was the ideal environment in which to stage romance’s extravagant spatial and ethnographical imaginings. Further, the chapter demonstrates how a theatrical tradition of clowning enabled these late-Elizabethan dramas to contest the values of the very romance-worlds they had established. It closes with a fresh reading of Francis Beaumont’s parody of romance, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, arguing that the play satirizes dramatic romance’s spatial grammar as well as its narrative strategies.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

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