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Professor Gair examines St Paul Cathedral 1553-1608, a commercially successful theatre and the players and playwrights who worked there.
Drawing on the generic and mythic strength of comedy and the theories of Bakhtin, Bergson, and Hobbes, this book identifies the radical nature of early modern English comedy. The satirical comedic actions that shape the "Shepherds' Play," Thomas Dekker's pamphlets, and the comic dramas of Marston, Middleton, and Jonson are all driven, Bowers points out, by an ability to criticize authority, assert plebeian culture, and insist on the complexity and innovation of human discourse. The texts examined (including The Jew of Malta, Metamorphosis of Ajax, Antonio and Mellida, Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) simultaneously create and employ standard comedic elements. ...
This volume bears potent testimony, not only to the dense complexity of Hamlet’s emotional dynamics, but also to the enduring fascination that audiences, adaptors, and academics have with what may well be Shakespeare’s moodiest play. Its chapters explore emotion in Hamlet, as well as the myriad emotions surrounding Hamlet’s debts to the medieval past, its relationship to the cultural milieu in which it was produced, its celebrated performance history, and its profound impact beyond the early modern era. Its component chapters are not unified by a single methodological approach. Some deal with a single emotion in Hamlet, while others analyse the emotional trajectory of a single character, and still others focus on a given emotional expression (e.g., sighing or crying). Some bring modern methodologies for studying emotion to bear on Hamlet, others explore how Hamlet anticipates modern discourses on emotion, and still others ask how Hamlet itself can complicate and contribute to our current understanding of emotion.
According to psychological research on acting, the histrionic personality consists of a compulsive tendency to play-act, exaggerate emotions, succumb to illusions, seek attention through speech, body language and costume, to be seductive and impulsive. An original intervention in the critical history of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Histrionic Hamlet argues that the Danish Prince is a stage representation of just such a personality—a born actor and a drama queen rather than a politician—incongruously thrown in the middle of ruthless high-stakes power struggle requiring pragmatic rather than theatrical skills. Uniquely among other English revenge tragedies, in Hamlet a histrionic prot...
"What if at night at the theaters in Elizabethan England more closely resembled attending a rugby match than sitting in a dark, silent audience, passively witnessing the action on the stage, or closer to going to a rock concert than sitting in front of a large or small screen, quietly and distantly absorbing a film or television drama? In this book, West proposes a new account of what happened in the playhouses of Shakespeare's time, and the kind of participatory entertainment expected by both the actors and the audience. Combining the precision of a philologist and the imagination of a philosopher, West performs careful readings of premodern figures of speech--including understanding, confu...
For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority. In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counter...
This text is an annual publication devoted to understanding drama as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays explore the relationship of the dramatic traditions to their precursors and successors, and examine the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays.
This is an invaluable collection of critical essays on the work of dramatist John Marston.