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In requiring artificial light, the early modern indoor theatre had to interrupt the action so that the candles could be attended to, if necessary. The origin of the five-act, four-interval play was not classical drama but candle technology. This Element explores the implications of this aspect of playmaking. Drawing on evidence in surviving texts it explores how the interval affected composition and stagecraft, how it provided opportunities for stage-sitters, and how amphitheatre plays were converted for indoor performance (and vice versa). Recovering the interval yields new insights into familiar texts and brings into the foreground interesting examples of how the interval functioned in lesser-known plays. This Element concludes with a discussion of how this aspect of theatre might feed into the debate over the King's Men's repertory management in its Globe-Blackfriars years and sets out the wider implications for both the modern theatre and the academy.
This volume contains nineteen essays — eighteen here presented for the first time — exploring the question of subjectivity as seen from a linguistic perspective. Part I concerns the relationship between the linguistic subject, particularly the grammatical first person, and the subject in more general sense of ‘person'. Topics covered include deixis, verbal marking and temporalisation, and performatives. Part II concerns the relationship of subjectivity to the experience of reading, and as such considers the semiotics of both literary and non-literary texts, inter-modal representation, authorship and intertextuality. The essays in the volume are principally influenced by the thinking of Saussure, Jakobson, Guillaume, Benveniste, Wittgenstein, Barthes and Deleuze, and the book will appeal to scholars with an interest in theoretical linguistics, semiotics, discourse, analysis and philosophy of language. Karl Simms provides comprehensive introductions to each of the parts, making the book accessible to inform general readers with an interest in cultural and communication studies.
Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeare’s canon. While many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people. This erasure is striking given the popularity of this topic in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. By exploring the limited ways in which Shakespeare uses Islamic and Muslim tropes and topoi, Ambereen Dadabhoy argues that Islam and Muslim cultures function as an alternate or shadow text in his works, ranging from his staged Mediterranean plays to his histories and comedies. By cons...
Facing persecution in early modern England, some Catholics chose exile over conformity. Some even cast their lot with foreign monarchs rather than wait for their own rulers to have a change of heart. This book studies the relationship forged by English exiles and Philip II of Spain. It shows how these expatriates, known as the “Spanish Elizabethans,” used the most powerful tools at their disposal—paper, pens, and presses—to incite war against England during the “messianic” phase of Philip’s reign, from the years leading up to the Grand Armada until the king’s death in 1598. Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez looks at English Catholic propaganda within its international and transnat...
Increasingly, academic communities transcend national boundaries. “Collaboration between researchers across space is clearly increasing, as well as being increasingly sought after,” noted the online magazine Inside Higher Ed in a recent article about research in the social sciences and humanities. Even for those scholars who don’t work directly with international colleagues, staying up-to-date and relevant requires keeping up with international currents of thought in one’s field. But when one’s colleagues span the globe, it’s not always easy to keep track of who’s who—or what kind of research they’re conducting. That’s where Intellect’s new series comes in. A set of wor...
An illuminating study of all works in the newly enlarged Middleton canon, placing them in personal, national, international and theatrical contexts.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.
Drawing on a wide range of drama from across the seventeenth century, including works by Marlowe, Heywood, Jonson, Brome, Davenant, Dryden and Behn, this book situates voyage drama in its historical and intellectual context between the individual act of reading in early modern England and the communal act of modern sightseeing.
Since medieval times, English literature has often demonized Muslims. The term ‘Islamophobia’ is recent, but the phenomenon is old. This survey of literature focusing on the modern period up to 1914 identifies negative ideas about Islam in novels and plays. Some works are iconic, some more obscure. However, the book highlights writers who challenged stereotypes and tended to see Muslims as equally capable of virtue and vice as Christians and others. The book deals with the role of the imagination in depicting others and how this serves authors’ agendas. The conclusion brings the book’s thesis into dialogue with the debate in the USA today between supporters of multiculturalism and its critics. Anyone interested in how stereotypes are formed, perpetuated and can be challenged will profit from this book. It is aimed at a non-specialist readership.
William Percy's Mahomet and His Heaven (1601) - roughly contemporary to Shakespeare's Othello - is the only known play of the early modern period to place the Prophet Mohammad on the stage. The play takes place in around the mosques of 'Mecha' and the action mirrors parts of the Qur'an, the Islamic holy text that was rarely available in England at the time.Matthew Dimmock presents here the play in its entirety, with a critical introduction which introduces some of the key themes of the play, and its textual and social context. A section of detailed explanatory scholarly notes follow the play, with a full translation of the short Latin sections and a reference to any political or literary parallels. This book should be required reading for historians and literary scholars dealing with notions of 'race' and 'religion' in early modern England.