Nina Levine
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823267866
- eISBN:
- 9780823272426
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823267866.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
Taking Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humor as its starting point, the introduction lays out the book’s operating assumptions about the early modern London stage and its turn to contemporary city ...
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Taking Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humor as its starting point, the introduction lays out the book’s operating assumptions about the early modern London stage and its turn to contemporary city subjects. Emphasizing its contribution to recent work on London culture and drama, the introduction outlines the book’s central concerns: with multiplicity and division within the city, with the urban practices that worked to engage spectators in interpreting and intervening in the rapidly changing urban milieu, and with a theater that is more along the lines of Plato’s anarchic theatrocracy than a unified theatron.Less
Taking Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humor as its starting point, the introduction lays out the book’s operating assumptions about the early modern London stage and its turn to contemporary city subjects. Emphasizing its contribution to recent work on London culture and drama, the introduction outlines the book’s central concerns: with multiplicity and division within the city, with the urban practices that worked to engage spectators in interpreting and intervening in the rapidly changing urban milieu, and with a theater that is more along the lines of Plato’s anarchic theatrocracy than a unified theatron.
Andreas Höfele
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199567645
- eISBN:
- 9780191731075
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567645.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
The introduction specifies the proximity of theatre and bear-baiting in the cultural topography of Shakespeare’s London. The two entertainments were not just physically close but joined in active ...
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The introduction specifies the proximity of theatre and bear-baiting in the cultural topography of Shakespeare’s London. The two entertainments were not just physically close but joined in active collusion, generating a perceptive overlap which included the scaffold of public execution as a third partner. This overlap provided a highly productive matrix for synopsis (‘seeing together’) of human actors and their animal counterparts in both their likeness and unlikeness. Evidence for the physical presence of animals on Shakespeare’s stage is scanty at best – even the bear in Winter’s Tale could well have been a human actor – but their imaginative presence is all the more powerful and far from innocent. The stage may have been tainted by the messy company of stake and scaffold, but its very closeness to the rending, tearing and killing also made it a unique platform for evoking sympathy for the suffering fellow creature.Less
The introduction specifies the proximity of theatre and bear-baiting in the cultural topography of Shakespeare’s London. The two entertainments were not just physically close but joined in active collusion, generating a perceptive overlap which included the scaffold of public execution as a third partner. This overlap provided a highly productive matrix for synopsis (‘seeing together’) of human actors and their animal counterparts in both their likeness and unlikeness. Evidence for the physical presence of animals on Shakespeare’s stage is scanty at best – even the bear in Winter’s Tale could well have been a human actor – but their imaginative presence is all the more powerful and far from innocent. The stage may have been tainted by the messy company of stake and scaffold, but its very closeness to the rending, tearing and killing also made it a unique platform for evoking sympathy for the suffering fellow creature.
David Carnegie and Gary Taylor (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199641819
- eISBN:
- 9780191749025
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199641819.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies
Celebrating the quatercenary of publication of the first translation of Don Quixote, this book addresses the ongoing debates about the lost Jacobean play The History of Cardenio, based on Cervantes, ...
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Celebrating the quatercenary of publication of the first translation of Don Quixote, this book addresses the ongoing debates about the lost Jacobean play The History of Cardenio, based on Cervantes, and commonly claimed to be by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. It also re-examines Lewis Theobald’s 1727 adaptation Double Falsehood. Offering new research findings based on a range of approaches — new historical evidence, employment of advanced computer-aided stylometric tests for authorship attribution, early modern theatre history, literary and theatrical analysis, study of the source material from Cervantes, early modern relationships between Spanish and English culture, and recent theatrical productions of both Double Falsehood and modern expansions of it — this book throws new light on whether the play deserves a place in Shakespeare’s canon and/or Fletcher’s. The book establishes the dates, venues, and audience for two performances of Cardenio by the King’s Men in 1613, and identifies for the first time evidence about the play in seventeenth-century documents. It also provides much new evidence and analysis of Double Falsehood, which Theobald claimed was based on previously unknown manuscripts of a play by Shakespeare. His enemies, especially Pope, denied the Shakespeare attribution. Debate has continued ever since. While some contributors advocate sceptical caution, new research provides stronger evidence than ever before that a lost Fletcher/Shakespeare Cardenio can be discerned within Double Falsehood. This book explores the Cardenio problem by reviving or adapting Double Falsehood, and demonstrates that such practical theatre work throws valuable light on some of the problems that have obstructed traditional scholarly approaches.Less
Celebrating the quatercenary of publication of the first translation of Don Quixote, this book addresses the ongoing debates about the lost Jacobean play The History of Cardenio, based on Cervantes, and commonly claimed to be by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. It also re-examines Lewis Theobald’s 1727 adaptation Double Falsehood. Offering new research findings based on a range of approaches — new historical evidence, employment of advanced computer-aided stylometric tests for authorship attribution, early modern theatre history, literary and theatrical analysis, study of the source material from Cervantes, early modern relationships between Spanish and English culture, and recent theatrical productions of both Double Falsehood and modern expansions of it — this book throws new light on whether the play deserves a place in Shakespeare’s canon and/or Fletcher’s. The book establishes the dates, venues, and audience for two performances of Cardenio by the King’s Men in 1613, and identifies for the first time evidence about the play in seventeenth-century documents. It also provides much new evidence and analysis of Double Falsehood, which Theobald claimed was based on previously unknown manuscripts of a play by Shakespeare. His enemies, especially Pope, denied the Shakespeare attribution. Debate has continued ever since. While some contributors advocate sceptical caution, new research provides stronger evidence than ever before that a lost Fletcher/Shakespeare Cardenio can be discerned within Double Falsehood. This book explores the Cardenio problem by reviving or adapting Double Falsehood, and demonstrates that such practical theatre work throws valuable light on some of the problems that have obstructed traditional scholarly approaches.
Katherine Gillen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474417716
- eISBN:
- 9781474434539
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474417716.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
The introduction demonstrates that chastity discourse resonates strongly with commercial discourses about currency, commodities, and value. It mines mercantile tracts, conduct books, and writings ...
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The introduction demonstrates that chastity discourse resonates strongly with commercial discourses about currency, commodities, and value. It mines mercantile tracts, conduct books, and writings about life in commercial London to show how early moderns interpreted rapidly shifting evaluations of currency, commodities, and selfhood. Readings of several primary texts elucidate the significance of chastity within English national discourse and establishe linkages between the epistemological questions surrounding chastity and those concerning commerce. The introduction also addresses the material conditions of the theatre, as the theatre’s commercial investments and embodied, often cross-dressed modes of representation heighten its concern with questions of value, commoditisation, and economic subjectivity. This opening chapter lays the groundwork for Chaste Value’s central claim that the public theatre engages with economic chastity discourse as a means of working through questions of personal value in early capitalist England.Less
The introduction demonstrates that chastity discourse resonates strongly with commercial discourses about currency, commodities, and value. It mines mercantile tracts, conduct books, and writings about life in commercial London to show how early moderns interpreted rapidly shifting evaluations of currency, commodities, and selfhood. Readings of several primary texts elucidate the significance of chastity within English national discourse and establishe linkages between the epistemological questions surrounding chastity and those concerning commerce. The introduction also addresses the material conditions of the theatre, as the theatre’s commercial investments and embodied, often cross-dressed modes of representation heighten its concern with questions of value, commoditisation, and economic subjectivity. This opening chapter lays the groundwork for Chaste Value’s central claim that the public theatre engages with economic chastity discourse as a means of working through questions of personal value in early capitalist England.
David Carnegie
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199641819
- eISBN:
- 9780191749025
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199641819.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter analyses Lewis Theobald’s adaptations of two early modern plays that survive in their original form, with the intention of providing evidence of the kind of treatment he might be ...
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This chapter analyses Lewis Theobald’s adaptations of two early modern plays that survive in their original form, with the intention of providing evidence of the kind of treatment he might be expected to have given the lost Fletcher/Shakespeare Cardenio in adapting it as Double Falsehood (1727). Close examination of Theobald’s The Fatal Secret, based on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and The Tragedy of King Richard II, based on Shakespeare’s play, reveals a coherent pattern of adaptation to suit neoclassical norms of the early eighteenth-century theatre. He consistently cuts and rewrites to achieve neoclassical unities, decorum, and plausibility. He frequently retains original speeches but gives them to other characters for different purposes. Importantly, he nearly always writes his own scene- and act-endings. These various techniques provide suggestive evidence about how Double Falsehood may differ from its early modern original.Less
This chapter analyses Lewis Theobald’s adaptations of two early modern plays that survive in their original form, with the intention of providing evidence of the kind of treatment he might be expected to have given the lost Fletcher/Shakespeare Cardenio in adapting it as Double Falsehood (1727). Close examination of Theobald’s The Fatal Secret, based on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and The Tragedy of King Richard II, based on Shakespeare’s play, reveals a coherent pattern of adaptation to suit neoclassical norms of the early eighteenth-century theatre. He consistently cuts and rewrites to achieve neoclassical unities, decorum, and plausibility. He frequently retains original speeches but gives them to other characters for different purposes. Importantly, he nearly always writes his own scene- and act-endings. These various techniques provide suggestive evidence about how Double Falsehood may differ from its early modern original.
Heather Hirschfeld
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801452741
- eISBN:
- 9780801470639
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801452741.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This introductory chapter begins by looking at how Othello's predicament represents the instance of a conceptual and affective dilemma—a problem of satisfaction—central to the language, plots, and ...
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This introductory chapter begins by looking at how Othello's predicament represents the instance of a conceptual and affective dilemma—a problem of satisfaction—central to the language, plots, and characters of the early modern theater. It investigates the sources of this dilemma in Reformation doctrine, its place in early modern structures of thought and feeling, and its imaginative representation on the English Renaissance stage. The chapter traces both the historical specificity and significance of the term “satisfaction” during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Such a notion is neglected by modern scholars who treat satisfaction as the transparent terminus of the category of desire. However, satisfaction's conceptual vigor gave it discursive purchase across multiple sociocultural vocabularies, including those associated with revenge, finance, and marriage.Less
This introductory chapter begins by looking at how Othello's predicament represents the instance of a conceptual and affective dilemma—a problem of satisfaction—central to the language, plots, and characters of the early modern theater. It investigates the sources of this dilemma in Reformation doctrine, its place in early modern structures of thought and feeling, and its imaginative representation on the English Renaissance stage. The chapter traces both the historical specificity and significance of the term “satisfaction” during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Such a notion is neglected by modern scholars who treat satisfaction as the transparent terminus of the category of desire. However, satisfaction's conceptual vigor gave it discursive purchase across multiple sociocultural vocabularies, including those associated with revenge, finance, and marriage.
Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199272051
- eISBN:
- 9780191699580
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272051.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
A combination of original theatre history and literary criticism, this book explores the original form in which Shakespeare's drama circulated. This was not the full play-text; it was not the public ...
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A combination of original theatre history and literary criticism, this book explores the original form in which Shakespeare's drama circulated. This was not the full play-text; it was not the public performance. It was the actor's part, consisting of the bare cues and speeches of each individual role. With group rehearsals rare or non-existent, the cued part alone had to furnish the actor with his character. But each such part-text was riddled with gaps and uncertainties. The actor knew what he was going to say, but not necessarily when, or why, or to whom; he may have known next to nothing of any other part. It demanded the most sensitive attention to the opportunities inscribed in the script, and to the ongoing dramatic moment. Here is where the young actor Shakespeare learnt his trade; here is where his imagination, verbal and technical, learnt to roam. As Shakespeare developed his playwriting, the apparent limitations of the medium were transformed into expressive opportunities. Both cue and speech become repositories of meaning and movement. Writing always for the same core group of players, Shakespeare could take — and insist upon — unprecedented risks. The result is onstage drama of astonishing immediacy. Starting with a comprehensive history of the part in early modern theatre, this book provides an insight into hitherto forgotten practices and techniques.Less
A combination of original theatre history and literary criticism, this book explores the original form in which Shakespeare's drama circulated. This was not the full play-text; it was not the public performance. It was the actor's part, consisting of the bare cues and speeches of each individual role. With group rehearsals rare or non-existent, the cued part alone had to furnish the actor with his character. But each such part-text was riddled with gaps and uncertainties. The actor knew what he was going to say, but not necessarily when, or why, or to whom; he may have known next to nothing of any other part. It demanded the most sensitive attention to the opportunities inscribed in the script, and to the ongoing dramatic moment. Here is where the young actor Shakespeare learnt his trade; here is where his imagination, verbal and technical, learnt to roam. As Shakespeare developed his playwriting, the apparent limitations of the medium were transformed into expressive opportunities. Both cue and speech become repositories of meaning and movement. Writing always for the same core group of players, Shakespeare could take — and insist upon — unprecedented risks. The result is onstage drama of astonishing immediacy. Starting with a comprehensive history of the part in early modern theatre, this book provides an insight into hitherto forgotten practices and techniques.
William M. Hamlin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199684113
- eISBN:
- 9780191764677
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684113.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, European Literature
This chapter centres on the claim that John Florio's translation of the Essays lends a strongly theatrical inflection to Montaigne's original French. Not only at the level of dramatic allusion, but ...
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This chapter centres on the claim that John Florio's translation of the Essays lends a strongly theatrical inflection to Montaigne's original French. Not only at the level of dramatic allusion, but within the very fabric of diction, idiom, and metaphor, Florio renders Montaigne into an English sharply attuned to contemporary interest in stage-plays and spectacle. The voice of Montaigne, for Jacobean poets, playwrights, and readers, is a voice exhibiting profound affinities with a theatrical orientation toward the world.Less
This chapter centres on the claim that John Florio's translation of the Essays lends a strongly theatrical inflection to Montaigne's original French. Not only at the level of dramatic allusion, but within the very fabric of diction, idiom, and metaphor, Florio renders Montaigne into an English sharply attuned to contemporary interest in stage-plays and spectacle. The voice of Montaigne, for Jacobean poets, playwrights, and readers, is a voice exhibiting profound affinities with a theatrical orientation toward the world.
Andreas Höfele
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199567645
- eISBN:
- 9780191731075
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567645.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
The book argues that powerful exchanges between stage, stake and scaffold – the theatre, the beargarden and the spectacle of public execution – crucially informed Shakespeare’s explorations into the ...
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The book argues that powerful exchanges between stage, stake and scaffold – the theatre, the beargarden and the spectacle of public execution – crucially informed Shakespeare’s explorations into the construction and workings of ‘the human’ as a psychological, ethical and political category. The theatre's family resemblance to animal baiting and the spectacle of capital punishment, with which it shares the same basic performance space – a theatre-in-the-round – bred potential for a transfer of images and meanings. The staging of any one of these performances was always framed by an awareness of the other two, whose presence was never quite erased and indeed was often emphatically foregrounded. Situating Shakespearean drama within its material environment, the book explores how this spill-over affects the way Shakespeare models his human characters and his understanding of ‘human character’ in general. His dramatis personae are infused with a degree of animality that a later Cartesian anthropology would categorically deny. Readings based on this later anthropology tend to reduce Shakespeare’s teeming animal references to markers of moral, social and ontological difference, ‘beast’ being everything ‘man’ is not or ought not to be. This book proposes that Shakespearean notions of humanity rely just as much on inclusion as on exclusion of the animal, more generally of a whole range of nonhuman creatures. Humans and animals face each other across the species divide, but the divide proves highly permeable.Less
The book argues that powerful exchanges between stage, stake and scaffold – the theatre, the beargarden and the spectacle of public execution – crucially informed Shakespeare’s explorations into the construction and workings of ‘the human’ as a psychological, ethical and political category. The theatre's family resemblance to animal baiting and the spectacle of capital punishment, with which it shares the same basic performance space – a theatre-in-the-round – bred potential for a transfer of images and meanings. The staging of any one of these performances was always framed by an awareness of the other two, whose presence was never quite erased and indeed was often emphatically foregrounded. Situating Shakespearean drama within its material environment, the book explores how this spill-over affects the way Shakespeare models his human characters and his understanding of ‘human character’ in general. His dramatis personae are infused with a degree of animality that a later Cartesian anthropology would categorically deny. Readings based on this later anthropology tend to reduce Shakespeare’s teeming animal references to markers of moral, social and ontological difference, ‘beast’ being everything ‘man’ is not or ought not to be. This book proposes that Shakespearean notions of humanity rely just as much on inclusion as on exclusion of the animal, more generally of a whole range of nonhuman creatures. Humans and animals face each other across the species divide, but the divide proves highly permeable.
Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven, and Karel Vanhaesebrouck (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784995164
- eISBN:
- 9781526128249
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784995164.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history ...
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This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studiesLess
This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies
Tanya Pollard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198804215
- eISBN:
- 9780191842412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198804215.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe not only as printed literary texts, but also through performances of a different sort. This chapter ...
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Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe not only as printed literary texts, but also through performances of a different sort. This chapter argues that fifth-century Greek plays on Homeric material played a crucial role in shaping the epics’ early modern reception. In a phrase widely circulated in the sixteenth century, Aeschylus reportedly claimed that all of his tragedies were ‘slices from the great banquets of Homer’. Although Virgil and Ovid were more familiar vehicles for Homeric material, Greek plays made distinctive contributions to perceptions of Troy and its aftermath through their links with performance, and their status as models for dramatic genres. It is proposed that the versions of Homer transmitted through Greek plays had an important role in shaping not only early modern understandings of Homer, but also the development of the early modern popular stage.Less
Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe not only as printed literary texts, but also through performances of a different sort. This chapter argues that fifth-century Greek plays on Homeric material played a crucial role in shaping the epics’ early modern reception. In a phrase widely circulated in the sixteenth century, Aeschylus reportedly claimed that all of his tragedies were ‘slices from the great banquets of Homer’. Although Virgil and Ovid were more familiar vehicles for Homeric material, Greek plays made distinctive contributions to perceptions of Troy and its aftermath through their links with performance, and their status as models for dramatic genres. It is proposed that the versions of Homer transmitted through Greek plays had an important role in shaping not only early modern understandings of Homer, but also the development of the early modern popular stage.
Marisa R. Cull
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780198716198
- eISBN:
- 9780191784354
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716198.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, Shakespeare Studies
This book spotlights the surprising abundance of princes of Wales—English and Welsh alike—appearing onstage in the late Tudor and early Stuart period. In drawing our attention to the oft-overlooked ...
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This book spotlights the surprising abundance of princes of Wales—English and Welsh alike—appearing onstage in the late Tudor and early Stuart period. In drawing our attention to the oft-overlooked and frequently misunderstood Welsh inheritance, and in investigating its staged and shadowed heirs in plays and court performances by Shakespeare, Peele, Fletcher, Jonson, and more, the book argues that scholarly interest in Wales’s influence on English national identity must be conditioned by the political and theatrical specificity of the princedom. Illuminating the princedom’s unique role as an extension of the Welsh past in contemporary England, Shakespeare’s Princes of Wales reveals early modern English culture’s understanding of the princedom as linked to England’s most pressing national crises: the connection between bloodline and succession, the anxiety over England’s native strength, and the process of fashioning a British state. In the pages of this book, we meet familiar characters—Hal, Glendower, Fluellen, and more—wholly transformed through the added insights about the princedom, and encounter long-ignored or forgotten heirs, meaningfully resurrected for the insights they provide on the Anglo-Welsh past. The book’s interdisciplinary focus will appeal to scholars studying the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern history and culture more generally, and British national identity from the early Tudor period to the dawn of the English Civil War.Less
This book spotlights the surprising abundance of princes of Wales—English and Welsh alike—appearing onstage in the late Tudor and early Stuart period. In drawing our attention to the oft-overlooked and frequently misunderstood Welsh inheritance, and in investigating its staged and shadowed heirs in plays and court performances by Shakespeare, Peele, Fletcher, Jonson, and more, the book argues that scholarly interest in Wales’s influence on English national identity must be conditioned by the political and theatrical specificity of the princedom. Illuminating the princedom’s unique role as an extension of the Welsh past in contemporary England, Shakespeare’s Princes of Wales reveals early modern English culture’s understanding of the princedom as linked to England’s most pressing national crises: the connection between bloodline and succession, the anxiety over England’s native strength, and the process of fashioning a British state. In the pages of this book, we meet familiar characters—Hal, Glendower, Fluellen, and more—wholly transformed through the added insights about the princedom, and encounter long-ignored or forgotten heirs, meaningfully resurrected for the insights they provide on the Anglo-Welsh past. The book’s interdisciplinary focus will appeal to scholars studying the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern history and culture more generally, and British national identity from the early Tudor period to the dawn of the English Civil War.
Margaret Kean
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198804215
- eISBN:
- 9780191842412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198804215.003.0013
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter considers how the epic underworld becomes accessible from the early modern London stage. It examines plays by Kyd, Dekker, and others, but the main focus is on Thomas Heywood’s The ...
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This chapter considers how the epic underworld becomes accessible from the early modern London stage. It examines plays by Kyd, Dekker, and others, but the main focus is on Thomas Heywood’s The Silver Age (1613), where katabatic movement on stage successfully translocates the descent narratives of erudite classical poetry into popular dramatic performance. The Silver Age retells the myth of Proserpina’s abduction by Pluto but it reconfigures Ovid’s account to fit within an episodic drama based around the life story of the Theban hero, Hercules. Heywood’s play offers an unusually independent and sustained response to classical materials, and an additional literary interest in Statius will be proposed. The chapter also employs recent work by theatre historians to reflect on the collaborative nature of early modern dramatic production, and on the repertoire and specific skill-set developed at the Red Bull Playhouse in the early years of the Jacobean era.Less
This chapter considers how the epic underworld becomes accessible from the early modern London stage. It examines plays by Kyd, Dekker, and others, but the main focus is on Thomas Heywood’s The Silver Age (1613), where katabatic movement on stage successfully translocates the descent narratives of erudite classical poetry into popular dramatic performance. The Silver Age retells the myth of Proserpina’s abduction by Pluto but it reconfigures Ovid’s account to fit within an episodic drama based around the life story of the Theban hero, Hercules. Heywood’s play offers an unusually independent and sustained response to classical materials, and an additional literary interest in Statius will be proposed. The chapter also employs recent work by theatre historians to reflect on the collaborative nature of early modern dramatic production, and on the repertoire and specific skill-set developed at the Red Bull Playhouse in the early years of the Jacobean era.
Deana Rankin
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198804215
- eISBN:
- 9780191842412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198804215.003.0025
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Amazons have long made their presence felt in epics of love, empire, and war; and from early antiquity to the present day, it is both at generically rocky impasses and geographically distinct ...
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Amazons have long made their presence felt in epics of love, empire, and war; and from early antiquity to the present day, it is both at generically rocky impasses and geographically distinct interstices that they make themselves known. This chapter explores these ideas with respect to the performance of the Amazon on the English and Irish stage across the first half of the seventeenth century. It focuses on a particular moment in early 1640, on the verge of the outbreak of civil war across the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, when, in London, Sir William Davenant’s Salamanca Spolia is performed at court and, in Dublin, Henry Burnell’s play Landgartha is performed at the public theatre in Werburgh Street. It locates these coinciding performances in the context of two evolving and competing English literary embodiments of the figure of the Amazon.Less
Amazons have long made their presence felt in epics of love, empire, and war; and from early antiquity to the present day, it is both at generically rocky impasses and geographically distinct interstices that they make themselves known. This chapter explores these ideas with respect to the performance of the Amazon on the English and Irish stage across the first half of the seventeenth century. It focuses on a particular moment in early 1640, on the verge of the outbreak of civil war across the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, when, in London, Sir William Davenant’s Salamanca Spolia is performed at court and, in Dublin, Henry Burnell’s play Landgartha is performed at the public theatre in Werburgh Street. It locates these coinciding performances in the context of two evolving and competing English literary embodiments of the figure of the Amazon.
