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Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London brings together a group of essays from across multiple fields of study that examine the socio-cultural, political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of pageantry in sixteenth and seventeenth-century London. This collection engages with modern interest in the spectacle and historical performances of pageantry and entertainments, including royal entries, progresses, coronation ceremonies, Lord Mayor’s Shows, and processions. Through a discussion of the extant texts, visual records, archival material, and emerging projects in the digital humanities, the chapters elucidate the forms in which the period itself recorded its ...
The graphic novel is the most exciting literary format to emerge in the past thirty years. Among its more inspired uses has been the superlative adaptation of literary classics. Unlike the comic book abridgments aimed at young readers of an earlier era, today's graphic novel adaptations are created for an adult audience, and capture the subtleties of sophisticated written works. This first ever collection of essays focusing on graphic novel adaptations of various literary classics demonstrates how graphic narrative offers new ways of understanding the classics, including the works of Homer, Poe, Flaubert, Conrad and Kafka, among many others.
Exploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetoric...
Dramatic performances at the universities in early modern England have usually been regarded as insular events, completely removed from the plays of the London stage. Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England challenges that long-held notion, illuminating how an apparently secluded theatrical culture became a major source of inspiration for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While many university plays featured classical themes, others reflected upon the academic environments in which they were produced, allowing a window into the universities themselves. This window proved especially fruitful for Shakespeare, who, as this book reveals, had a sustained fascination with the un...
Old St Paul’s and Culture is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that looks predominantly at the culture of Old St Paul’s and its wider precinct in the early modern period, while also providing important insights into the Cathedral’s medieval institution. The chapters examine the symbolic role of the site in England’s Christian history, the London book trade based in and around St Paul’s, the place of St Paul’s commercial indoor playhouse within the performance culture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, and the intersection of religion and politics through events such as civic ceremonies and occasional sermons. Through the organising theme of culture, the authors ...
Which John Dryden should be brought into the twenty-first-century college classroom? The rehabilitator of the ancients? The first of the moderns? The ambivalent laureate? The sidelined convert to Rome? The literary theorist? The translator? The playwright? The poet? This volume in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature addresses the tensions, contradictions, and versatility of a writer who, in the words of Samuel Johnson, "found [English poetry] brick, and left it marble," who was, in the words of Walter Scott, "one of the greatest of our masters." Part 1, "Materials," offers a guide to the teaching editions of Dryden's work and a discussion of the background resources, from biographies and literary criticism to social, cultural, political, and art histories. In part 2, "Approaches," essays describe different pedagogical entries into Dryden and his time. These approaches cover subjects as various as genre, adaptation, literary rivalry, musical setting, and political and religious poetry in classroom situations that range from the traditional survey to learning through performance.
The story of the troubled accession of England's first Scottish king and the transition from the age of the Tudors to the age of the Stuarts at the dawn of the seventeenth century.
What is the value of performing Shakespeare's plays for young people? Using interviews with theatre workers, rehearsal observations and workshops with young people, this book argues that, rather than promoting a range of pre-determined textual understandings of the plays, it is by trusting young people's experience of performances that they might gain most benefit. It argues that by privileging the meanings young people make of Shakespeare, new and exciting interpretations of his work might be found. Drawing on case studies from theatre companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, Tiny Ninja Theatre Company and Company of Angels Theatre Company, Jan Wozniak shows how the collaboration and materiality of performance is central to empowering young people to engage with, enjoy and challenge Shakespeare.
The search to find engaging and inspiring ways to introduce children and young adults to Shakespeare has resulted in a rich variety of approaches to producing and adapting Shakespeare's plays and the stories and characters at their heart. Shakespeare for Young People is the only comprehensive overview of such productions and adaptations, and engages with a wide range of genres, including both British and American examples. Abigail Rokison covers stage and screen productions, shortened versions, prose narratives and picture books (including Manga), animations and original novels. The book combines an informative guide to these interpretations of Shakespeare, discussed with critical analysis of their relative strengths. It also includes extensive interviews with directors, actors and writers involved in the projects discussed'.
This book explores historical, socio-political, and metatheatrical readings of a whole host of dying bodies and risen corpses, each part of a long tradition of living death on stage. Just as zombies, ghouls, and the undead in modern media often stand in for present-day concerns, early modern writers frequently imagined living death in complex ways that allowed them to address contemporary anxieties. These include fresh bleeding bodies (and body parts), ghostly Lord Mayors, and dying characters who must carefully choose their last words – or have those words chosen for them by the living. As well as offering fresh interpretations of well-known plays such as Middleton’s The Lady’s Traged...