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This collection of essays examines early modern drama in the context of book history, and focuses on the readership of plays that opens different perspectives on the relationship between the cultures of print and performance.
Marta Straznicky offers a detailed historical analysis of early modern women's closet plays: plays explicitly written for reading, rather than public performance. She reveals that such works were part of an alternative dramatic tradition, an elite and private literary culture, which was understood as intellectually superior to and politically more radical than commercial drama. Elizabeth Cary, Jane Lumley, Anne Finch and Margaret Cavendish wrote their plays in this conjunction of the public and the private at a time when male playwrights dominated the theatres. In her astute readings of the texts, their contexts and their physical appearance in print or manuscript, Straznicky has produced many fresh insights into the place of women's closet plays both in the history of women's writing and in the history of English drama.
Shakespeare Studies, edited by Leeds Barroll, a Scholar in Residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. It includes substantial reviews of significant books and essays dealing with the cultural history of early modern England, as well as the place of Shakespeare's productions--and those of his contemporaries--within it. Volume XXXI presents a new feature, the first in an annual series of articles on Early Modern Drama around the World. Specialists in each national drama being presented in other areas of the globe during the time of Shakespeare ...
Recent studies in early modern cultural bibliography have put forth a radically new Shakespeare—a man of keen literary ambition who wrote for page as well as stage. His work thus comes to be viewed as textual property and a material object not only seen theatrically but also bought, read, collected, annotated, copied, and otherwise passed through human hands. This Shakespeare was invented in large part by the stationers—publishers, printers, and booksellers—who produced and distributed his texts in the form of books. Yet Shakespeare's stationers have not received sustained critical attention. Edited by Marta Straznicky, Shakespeare's Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography shifts ...
This volume presents three plays by women that were written in specific household contexts and survive in distinctive handwritten copies dating from their authors’ lifetimes. Care is taken in the introductions, notes, and apparatus to make the plays accessible to non-specialist readers while also preserving early modern orthography, punctuation, and manuscript practices. Each play is presented in an edited old-spelling text and set within its literary, biographical, and theatrical context. The volume as a whole foregrounds the early modern household as a uniquely productive setting for women’s theatrical and literary activity. Volume 66 in the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Chicago Series
A collection of essays exploring John Milton's rise to popularity and his status as a canonical author. The volume considers Milton's 'authorial persona' in the context of his relationships with his contemporary writers, stationers, and readers.
Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England is the first book-length study of early modern English playbook typography. It tells a new history of drama from the period by considering the page designs of plays by Shakespeare and others printed between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It argues that typography, broadly conceived, was used creatively by printers, publishers, playwrights, and other agents of the book trade to make the effects of theatricality--from the most basic (textually articulating a change in speaker) to the more complex (registering the kinesis of bodies on stage)--intelligible on the page. The coalescence of these expe...
This book demonstrates how the book trade of 1640-1740 canonised Shakespeare by selling, editing and promoting his plays and poems.
This book explores the methodologies and assumptions governing answers to the question 'what did Shakespeare actually write?'
The Dutch were culturally ubiquitous in England during the early modern period and constituted London's largest alien population in the second half of the sixteenth century. While many sought temporary refuge from Spanish oppression in the Low Countries, others became part of a Dutch diaspora, developing their commercial, spiritual, and domestic lives in England. The category "Dutch" catalyzed questions about English self-definition that were engendered less by large-scale cultural distinctions than by uncanny similarities. Doppelgänger Dilemmas uncovers the ways England's real and imagined proximities with the Dutch played a crucial role in the making of English ethnicity. Marjorie Rubrigh...