You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This is a comprehensive reference guide examining the language employed by Shakespeare to represent women in the full range of his poetry and plays. Including over 350 entries, Alison Findlay shows the role of women within Shakespearean drama, their representations on the Shakespearean stage, and their place in Shakespeare's personal and professional lives.
We know that women made up a significant part of Renaissance theatre audiences but how might they have read the plays presented there?
This study examines the playing spaces for early modern women's drama.
In Renaissance drama, the bastard is an extraordinarily powerful and disruptive figure. We have only to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realise the challenge presented by the illegitimate child. Drawing on a wide range of play texts, Alison Findlay shows how illegitimacy encoded and threatened to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of patriarchal rule. She considers bastards as indicators and instigators of crisis in early modern England, reading them in relation to witchcraft, spiritual insecurities and social unrest in family and State. The characters discussed range from demi-devils, unnatural villains and clowns to outstandingly heroic or virtuous types who challenge officially sanctioned ideas of illegitimacy. The final chapter of the book considers bastards in performance; their relationship with theatre spaces and audiences. Illegitimate voices, Findlay argues, can bring about the death of the author/father and open the text as a piece of theatre, challenging accepted notions of authority.
This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.
This book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britai...
This Handbook provides an introductory guide to Much Ado About Nothing offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key productions, a survey of film and TV adaptation, a wide sampling of critical opinion and further reading.
Twelfth Night is the most mature and fully developed of Shakespeare's comedies and, as well as being one of his most popular plays, represents a crucial moment in the development of his art. Assembled by leading scholars, this guide provides a comprehensive survey of major issues in the contemporary study of the play. Throughout the book chapters explore such issues as the play's critical reception from John Manningham's account of one of its first performances to major current comentators like Stephen Greenblatt; the performance history of the play, from Shakespeare's day to the present and key themes in current scholarship, from issues of gender and sexuality to the study of comedy and song. Twelfth Night: A Critical Guide also includes a complete guide to resources available on the play - including critical editions, online resources and an annotated bibliography - and how they might be used to aid both the teaching and study of Shakespeare's enduring comedy.
Im Mittelpunkt dieses Bandes stehen die Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Selbstverständnis schreibender Frauen und den religiösen und kulturellen Veränderungsprozessen vom 15. bis ins 17. Jahrhundert. Das Augenmerk liegt insbesondere auf den unterschiedlichen Wegen, die Frauen in dieser Zeit beschritten haben, um sich schriftlich zu äußern, ihre Texte zu verbreiten und am Austausch intellektueller Zirkel teilzunehmen. Einerseits geht es also um die Kommunikationsräume, in denen Verfasserinnen sich in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit bewegt haben, und andererseits um die Kommunikationsformen, die sie hierfür gewählt haben. Zusammen genommen sind die Kommunikationsräume und -formen der...
Bodies and their Spaces: System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre explores the emergence of the distinctively modern "gender system" at the close of the early modern period. The book investigates shifts in the gendered spaces assigned to men and women in the "public" and "private" domains and their changing modes of interconnection; in concert with these social spaces it examines the emergence of biologically based notions of sex and a novel sense of individual subjectivity. These parallel and linked transformations converged in the development of a new gender system which more efficiently enforced the requirements of patriarchy under the evolving economic conditions of merc...