You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Knutson demystifies Shakespeare and his company by providing a clear vision of the dynamics of repertory management and play-going in Shakespeare's England.
This edition disengages Shakespeare's exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two 16th-century 'Shrew' plays as textually independent but theatrically interdependent.
Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time, first published in 2011, examines the nature of commercial relations among the theatre companies in London during the time of Shakespeare. Roslyn Knutson argues that the playing companies cooperated in the adoption of business practices that would enable the theatrical enterprise to flourish. Suggesting the guild as a model of economic cooperation, Knutson considers the networks of fellowship among players, the marketing strategies of the repertory, and company relationships with playwrights and members of the book trade. The book challenges two entrenched views about theatrical commerce: that companies engaged in cut-throat rivalry to drive one another out of business and that companies based business decisions on the personal and professional quarrels of the players and dramatists with whom they worked. This important contribution to theatre history will be of interest to scholars as well as historians.
The diary of Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre in London during the 1590s, remains the most valuable source of information about the workings of the Elizabethan public theatres. Discussions of theatres and drama in the age of Shakespeare routinely refer to Henslowe, whose 'diary' touches on every aspect of the day-to-day operations of the Rose and the companies of actors, especially the Admiral's Men. The diary preserves the account-book of an Elizabethan theatre owner who was also the father-in-law of the leading actor, Edward Alleyn, and contains many miscellaneous and personal entries. The first edition of Henslowe's Diary, published in 1961, has long been out of print. It provides a thorough introduction to the manuscript, a full transcription of the document itself and several helpful appendices and indexes. For this second edition one of the original editors, R. A. Foakes, has added a new preface and reading list.
In this first full history of the first great Elizabethan play company, Laurie Johnson shows the vital role of Leicester's Men in developing the main features of Shakespearean theatre. Unearthing new discoveries from wide-ranging primary material, he tells the fascinating stories of the lives of the earliest Elizabethan players.
Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries. In the century following his death he was seen by many as the finest of all English writers, living or dead. His fame rested not only on the numerous plays he had written for the theatre, but on his achievements over three decades as principal masque-writer to the early Stuart court, where he had worked in creative, and often stormy, collaboration with Inigo Jones. One of the most accomplished poets of the age, he had become - in fact if not in title - the first Poet Laureate in England. Jonson's life was full of drama. Serving in the Low Countries as a young man, he overcame a Spanish adversary in single combat in full view of bot...
A popular and influential play from its first performance in 1611 until the early eighteenth century, 'A King and No King' helped establish tragicomedy as the seventeenth century's favoured dramatic genre, and Beaumont and Fletcher as leading playwrights of the day.Accompanying this newly edited text, an introduction explores the play's sources, both literary and dramatic, and offers a thorough reconsideration of its relation to its social and political context, and contemporary issues of royal absolutism, good governance, and the political role of the aristocracy. In addition, the introduction provides the fullest available account of 'A King and No King''s stage history, tracing the shifts in cultural mores that eroded its popularity and ultimately consigned it to the study rather than the stage. This fully annotated edition encourages an appreciation of the play's very real virtues and will appeal to theatre professionals as well as to students of Renaissance drama.
The core of the ground-breaking, three text edition, this self-contained, free-standing volume gives readers the Second Quarto text (1604-5) and includes in its Introduction, notes and Appendices all the reader might expect to find in any standard Arden edition. As well as a full, illustrated Introduction to the play?s historical, cultural and performance contexts and a thorough survey of critical approaches to the play, an appendix contains the additional passages found only in the 1623 text. The core of the ground-breaking, three text edition, this self-contained, free-standing volume gives readers the Second Quarto text (1604-5) and includes in its Introduction, notes and Appendices all the reader might expect to find in any standard Arden edition. As well as a full, illustrated Introduction to the play?s historical, cultural and performance contexts and a thorough survey of critical approaches to the play, an appendix contains the additional passages found only in the 1623 text.
This book provides a detailed study of the Children of the Queen's Revels, the most enduring and influential of the Jacobean children's companies. Between 1603 and 1613 the Queen's Revels staged plays by Francis Beaumont, George Chapman, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, all of whom were at their most innovative when writing for this company. Combining theatre history and critical analysis, this study provides a history of the Children of the Queen's Revels, and an account of their repertory. It examines the 'biography' of the company - demonstrating the involvement in dramatic production of dramatists, shareholders, patrons, audiences and actors alike, and reappraising issues such as management, performance style and audience composition - before exploring their groundbreaking practices in comedy, tragicomedy and tragedy. The book also includes five documentary appendices detailing the plays, people and performances of the Queen's Revels Company.
Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.