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This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.
The major claim made by this study is that early modern English prose fiction self-consciously invented a new form of literary culture in which professional writers created books to be printed and sold to anonymous readers. It further claims that this period's narrative innovations emerged not solely from changes in early modern culture like print and the book market, but also from the rediscovery of a forgotten late classical text from North Africa, Heliodorus's Aethiopian History. In making these claims, Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fi...
The calculated use of media by those in power is a phenomenon dating back at least to the seventeenth century, as Harold Weber demonstrates in this illuminating study of the relation of print culture to kingship under England's Charles II. Seventeenth-century London witnessed an enormous expansion of the print trade, and with this expansion came a revolutionary change in the relation between political authority—especially the monarchy—and the printed word. Weber argues that Charles' reign was characterized by a particularly fluid relationship between print and power. The press helped bring about both the deconsecration of divine monarchy and the formation of a new public sphere, but thes...
Performing Affect, Volume 31 of Renaissance Drama, examines the rehearsal of emotion on the Renaissance stage. These new essays consider the ways in which Renaissance plays represent emotional states, while also presenting new scholarship specifically on the performance of affect on the early modern stage. The essays thus consider the continuing effects of affect in early modern culture more broadly, beyond the thrust stage, asking the question: what are the instrumental and performative effects of Renaissance drama in a larger conception of Renaissance emotions? How do we reckon the effects of early modern drama and performance within a larger history of the emotive self? A number of these essays significantly press at the borders of the customary terms we use to denote emotional states, states for which the best early modern terms may well be affect and passions. Topics include: emotion and the humoral body; domestic abuse and trauma; the politics of onstage gesture; the relation of idolatry, desire, and necrophilia; the performance of such affective states as religious fervor, memory, jealousy, melancholy, and heroic masculinity. Renaissance Drama, an annual and interd
Volume XXX of this award-winning publication examines texts in relationship to the institutions that shaped early modern culture - the printing industry, the market-place of both texts and fashions, theatrical companies - as well as manuscript circulation, authorship, and issues relating to the family and paternity. In essays that range across the terrain of early modern culture, the contributors use a wide variety of methodologies to explore their interests and tackle fundamental questions. Renaissance Drama, an annual publication, is devoted to drama as a central feature of Renaissance culture. Displaying an interdisciplinary orientation, the essays in each volume explore the Renaissance dramatic traditions in relation to their precursors and successors and examine the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays.
"Recent influential work on Jacobean city comedies, by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Douglas Bruster in particular, is confined to the well-worn topics of urban alienation and the avaricious merchant, drawing on 1550s sermons and tracts against usury. In this model, where social credit is deemed to circulate without limit, the city comedy's specific reference to contemporary ideas of trade, cash, and credit is lost. The plays are reduced to moral satires against greed, humoural comedies of the hollow self, or self-referencing literary artifacts which create and interact with a coterie audience. Aging rants against avarice might account for earlier interludes which mock usurers and misers, but not for the slick, formal pleasures of the city comedy, bringing together gull, courtesan, prodigal gallant, virgin daughter, and jealous citizen father or husband."--BOOK JACKET.
This is an annual publication devoted to understanding the drama as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The interdisciplinary essays explore the relationship of Renaissance dramatic traditions to their precursors and successors, and examine the impact of different forms of interpretation.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best-loved of Shakespeare's plays, and certainly the one that children are likely to encounter first; its mixture of aristocrats, workers, and fairies meeting in a wood outside Athens has a magic of its own. Simple and engaging on the surface, it isnonetheless a highly original and sophisticated work, remarkable for both its literary and its theatrical mastery. The fact that it is one of the very few of Shakespeare's plays not to draw on a narrative source suggests the degree to which it reflects his deepest imaginative concerns.In his Introduction, defining the play in both the literary and theatrical traditions to which it belongs, Peter Holland pays particular attention to dreams and dreamers, tracing the materials out of which Shakespeare constructs his world of night and shadows in the strange but enchanting amalgam hemakes of them. Both here and in the detailed commentary he draws freely upon the play's extensive performance history to illustrate the wide range of interpretations of which it is capable.
Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture is a comprehensive companion to The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, providing detailed introductions to and full editorial apparatus for the works themselves as well as a wealth of information about Middleton's historical and literary context.
Since the 1970s there has been a broad and vital reinterpretation of the nature of literary texts, a move away from formalism to a sense of literature as an aspect of social, economic, political, and cultural history. While the earliest New Historicist work was criticized for a narrow and anecdotal view of history, it also served as an important stimulus for post-structuralist, feminist, Marxist, and psychoanalytical work, which in turn has increasingly informed and redirected it. Recent writing on the nature of representation, the historical construction of gender and of the concept of identity itself, on theatre as a political and economic phenomenon, and on the ideologies of art generally, reveals the breadth of the field. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture is designed to offer historically oriented studies of Renaissance literature and theatre which make use of the insights afforded by theoretical perspectives. The view of history envisioned is above all a view of our history, a reading of the Renaissance for and from our own time. Book jacket.