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Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court constitutes the first full-length study of Jacobean nuptial performance, a hitherto unexplored branch of early modern theater consisting of masques and entertainments performed for high-profile weddings. Scripted by such writers as Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont, these entertainments were mounted for some of the most significant political events of James's English reign. Here Kevin Curran analyzes all six of the elite weddings celebrated at the Jacobean court, reading the masques and entertainments that headlined these events alongside contemporaneously produced panegyrics, festival books, sermons, parliamentary speeches, and other sources. The study shows how, collectively, wedding entertainments turned the idea of union into a politically versatile category of national representation and offered new ways of imagining a specifically Jacobean form of national identity by doing so.
During the twentieth century, an increasingly diverse range of buildings and spaces was used for theatre. Theatre architecture was re-formed by new approaches to staging and performance, while theatre was often thought to have a reforming role in society. Innovation was accompanied by the revival and reinterpretation of older ideas. The contributors to this volume explore these ideas in a variety of contexts, from detailed discussions of key architects’ work (including Denys Lasdun, Peter Moro, Cedric Price and Heinrich Tessenow) to broader surveys of theatre in West Germany and Japan. Other contributions examine the Malmö Stadsteater, ’ideal’ theatres in post-war North America, ’found space’ in 1960s New York, and Postmodernity in 1980s East Germany. Together these essays shed new light on this complex building type and also contribute to the wider architectural history of the twentieth century.
The rebuilding of the Globe theatre (1599-1613) on London's Bankside, a few yards from the site of the playhouse in which many of Shakespeare's plays were first performed, must rank as one of the most imaginative enterprises of recent decades. It has aroused intense interest among scholars and the general public worldwide. This book offers a fully illustrated account of the research that has gone into the Globe reconstruction, drawing on the work of leading scholars, theatre people and craftsmen to provide an authoritative view of the twenty years of research and the hundreds of practical decisions entailed. Documents of the period are explored afresh; the techniques of timber-framed building and the decorative practices of Elizabethan craftsmen explained; and all of this reconciled with the requirements of the actors and restrictions of modern architectural design. The result is a book that will fascinate scholarly readers and laymen alike.
Recent performances of early modern plays are analysed in essays by practitioners and academics, featuring critical, pedagogical and practical approaches.
"In 2021, its Diamond Jubilee year, the Association of British Theatre Technicians undertook to revise Theatre Buildings: a Design Guide (Routledge, 2010). This new edition (Routledge, 2023) has substantially re-written text with fresh images and entirely new reference projects, providing essential guidance for all those engaged in the design of theatre buildings. Edited by Margaret Shewring (Emeritus Reader, University of Warwick, former director of the postgraduate diploma and MA in theatre consultancy), this new publication is written by a team of international experts, architects, theatre consultants, acousticians, engineers and industry professionals led by Tim Foster (Foster Wilson Siz...
The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576-1642 looks at London theatre at the time of Shakespeare and how it represented the New World, considering whether early modern drama was anti-American, as some contemporaries suggested.
Provides an international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet to question dramatic assumptions.
In this expanded analysis of Macbeth in performance, Bernice W. Kliman examines a number of major productions of the play on stage and screen, inviting the reader to contemplate and compare directors' and actors' choices for what is arguably Shakespeare's most compelling play. Kliman's in-depth analysis of Orson Welles's 1948 film version as well as his earlier stage production, Roman Polanski's famous film, and several different television versions from America and Britain offers an invaluable guide to the most prominent performances across a range of media. She also considers Yukio Ninagawa's staging, which provides an exciting and novel Japanese perspective on the play for Western audiences.
As the first book-length study of waterborne festivities in Renaissance and early modern Europe, this collection of essays draws on a rich array of sources, many previously un-researched, to explore aspects of scenography, choreography, music, fashion, painting, sculpture, architecture, stage-and personnel-management and urban planning as evinced in spectacles staged on water. Bodies of water in all their variety are explored here: seas, rivers, fountains, lakes and canals and flooded improvised locations within or adjacent to great buildings all provided stages for elaborate and costly performances, utilising the particular qualities of water to reflect light and distort sound. The volume e...