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Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare's England
Holger Syme presents a radically new explanation for the theatre's importance in Shakespeare's time. He portrays early modern England as a culture of mediation, dominated by transactions in which one person stood in for another, giving voice to absent speakers or bringing past events to life. No art form related more immediately to this culture than the theatre. Arguing against the influential view that the period underwent a crisis of representation, Syme draws upon extensive archival research in the fields of law, demonology, historiography and science to trace a pervasive conviction that testimony and report, delivered by properly authorised figures, provided access to truth. Through detailed close readings of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare - in particular Volpone, Richard II and The Winter's Tale - and analyses of criminal trial procedures, the book constructs a revisionist account of the nature of representation on the early modern stage.
The One King Lear
King Lear exists in two different texts: the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623). Because each supplies passages missing in the other, for over 200 years editors combined the two to form a single text, the basis for all modern productions. Then in the 1980s a group of influential scholars argued that the two texts represent different versions of King Lear, that Shakespeare revised his play in light of theatrical performance. The two-text theory has since hardened into orthodoxy. Now for the first time in a book-length argument, one of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars challenges the two-text theory. At stake is the way Shakespeare’s greatest play is read and performed. Sir Bri...
‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication
At the start of the seventeenth century a distinction emerged between 'public', outdoor, amphitheatre playhouses and 'private', indoor, hall venues. This book is the first sustained attempt to ask: why? Theatre historians have long acknowledged these terms, but have failed to attest to their variety and complexity. Assessing a range of evidence, from the start of the Elizabethan period to the beginning of the Restoration, the book overturns received scholarly wisdom to reach new insights into the politics of theatre culture and playbook publication. Standard accounts of the 'public' and 'private' theatres have either ignored the terms, or offered insubstantial explanations for their use. This book opens up the rich range of meanings made available by these vitally important terms and offers a fresh perspective on the way dramatists, theatre owners, booksellers, and legislators, conceived the playhouses of Renaissance London.
The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy
An exploration of wit, witlessness and social and comic conventions in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries.
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy
An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.
Christopher Marlowe in Context
A contemporary of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe was one of the most influential early modern dramatists, whose life and mysterious death have long been the subject of critical and popular speculation. This collection sets Marlowe's plays and poems in their historical context, exploring his world and his wider cultural influence. Chapters by leading international scholars discuss both his major and lesser-known works. Divided into three sections, 'Marlowe's works', 'Marlowe's world', and 'Marlowe's reception', the book ranges from Marlowe's relationship with his own audience through to adaptations of his plays for modern cinema. Other contexts for Marlowe include history and politics, religion and science. Discussions of Marlowe's critics and Marlowe's appeal today, in performance, literature and biography, show how and why his works continue to resonate; and a comprehensive further reading list provides helpful suggestions for those who want to find out more.
The Queen's Men and Their Plays
This is the first book devoted to the Queen's Men, one of the major acting companies of the age of Shakespeare. In describing the troupe's position in the general political situation and the London theatre scene of the 1580s, the authors break new ground by showing how Elizabethan theatre history can be refocused by concentrating on the company which produced the plays rather than on the authors who wrote them. The book combines a thorough examination of documentary evidence with textual and critical analysis, to provide a full account of the characteristics which gave the company its identity: its acting style, staging methods, touring patterns and repertoire. The conclusions will interest Elizabethan historians as well as students and scholars of early modern theatre.
Documents of Performance in Early Modern England
As well as 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were known as 'play-patchers' because their texts were made from separate documents. This book is the first to consider all the papers created by authors and theatres by the time of the opening performance, recovering types of script not previously known to have existed. With chapters on plot-scenarios, arguments, playbills, prologues and epilogues, songs, staged scrolls, backstage-plots and parts, it shows how textually distinct production was from any single unified book. And, as performance documents were easily lost, relegated or reused, the story of a play's patchy creation also becomes the story of its co-authorship, cuts, revisions and additions. Using a large body of fresh evidence, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England brings a wholly new reading to printed and manuscript playbooks of the Shakespearean period, redefining what a play, and what a playwright, actually is.
Locating the Queen's Men, 1583-1603
Locating the Queen's Men presents new and groundbreaking essays on the theatrical and economic contexts of this prominent acting company. Offering a detailed critical engagement that includes a repertory study and investigations into distinctive style, this collection revises standard accounts of Elizabethan theatre history, showing that the company, which bridged a gap between medieval dramatic traditions and the era of Shakespeare and Marlowe, was a vital force in early modern England.
Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies
Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices. At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s...
