Veröffentlicht von Medieval Institute Publications

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Gender, Performance, and Material Culture

Herausgegeben von: Cristina León Alfar und Helen Ostovich

Übersicht
Bände

This series provides a forum for monographs and essay collections that investigate the material culture, broadly conceived, of theatre and performance in England from the late Tudor to the pre-Restoration Stuart periods (ca. 1550–1650). The editors invite proposals for book-length studies engaging in the material vitality of the dramatic text, political culture, theatre and performance history, theatrical design, performance spaces, gendering court entertainments, child- and adult-actors, music, dance, and audiences in London and on tour. We are also interested in the discursive production of gender, sex, and race in early modern England in relation to material historical, social, cultural, and political structures; changes to and effects of law; monarchy and the republic in dramatic texts; theatre and performance, including performance spaces that are not in theatres. Further topics might include the production and consumption of things and ideas; costumes, props, theatre records and accounts, gendering of spaces and geographies (court, tavern, street, and household, rural or urban), cross-dressing, military or naval excursions, gendered pastimes, games, behaviors, rituals, fashions, transnational encounters, the disabled, and the demonic and their reflection in text and performance.

The series’ Editorial Board comprises:

Cristina León Alfar, Hunter College, CUNY, USA, Series Editor
Helen Ostovich, McMaster University, Canada, Series Editor

Fachgebiete

Buch 2023

Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

Asuka Kimura

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The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513893
ISBN:: 9781501513893
ISBN:: 9781501520204
ISBN:: 9781501513954
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Mittelalter
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2022

The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern Stage

Lisa Hopkins

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Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514159
ISBN:: 9781501514159
ISBN:: 9781501514173
ISBN:: 9781501520334
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Frühe Neuzeit
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Fachgebiet:: Literaturgeschichte
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2021

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama

Mark Kaethler

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Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton’s dramatic works as responses to James I’s governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of Middleton’s writings, ranging from his first extant play The Phoenix (1604) to his scandalous finale A Game at Chess (1624). In the course of this investigation, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513763
ISBN:: 9781501513763
ISBN:: 9781501518195
ISBN:: 9781501513992
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Fachgebiet:: Ausgewählte Themen der Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Recht
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2020

Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary

The Performance of Difference

Frederika Elizabeth Bain

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The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of negative and positive dismemberments, from the castration anxieties of Turk plays to the elite practices of distributive burial. This study argues that representations and instances of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Within this context it examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts’ assumed symbolic meanings. Specific chapters address ways dismemberments manifested gender, human versus animal nature, religious and ethnic identity, and social rank. The book concludes by examining the afterlives of body parts, including relics and specimens exhibited for entertainment and education, contextualized by discussion of the resurrection body and its promise of bodily reintegration. Grounded in dramatic works, the study also incorporates a variety of genres from midwifery manuals to broadside ballads.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513237
ISBN:: 9781501513237
ISBN:: 9781501512957
ISBN:: 9781501517860
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 8.-15. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2020

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Domenico Lovascio

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Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514203
ISBN:: 9781501514203
ISBN:: 9781501518560
ISBN:: 9781501514050
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Fachgebiet:: Ausgewählte Themen der Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Geschlecht und Literatur
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2020

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works

In Medias Res

Vanessa L. Rapatz

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Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious; Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy The Rover; and seventeenth-century dialogues that include both a Catholic treatise promoting women's entrance into European convents and a proto-pornographic exposé of such convents. Convents, novices, and problem plays emerge as parallel sites of ambiguity that reflect the social, political, and religious uncertainties England faced after the Reformation.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343
ISBN:: 9781501513343
ISBN:: 9781501517907
ISBN:: 9781501513145
Fachgebiet:: Kulturwissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Ausgewählte Themen in den Kulturwissenschaften
Fachgebiet:: Religion
Fachgebiet:: Geschichte
Fachgebiet:: Historische Epochen
Fachgebiet:: Mittelalter
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Theologie und Religion
Fachgebiet:: Kirchengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2020

New Directions in Early Modern English Drama

Edges, Spaces, Intersections

Aidan Norrie, Mark Houlahan

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This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Recent scholarship has begun to think more critically about the edge, particularly in relation to the canon and canonicity. This book demonstrates that the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theaters, and audiences. The book engages with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality to acknowledge and extend the rich sense of playmaking and all its ancillary activities that have emerged over the last decade. The essays by a global team of scholars bring to life people and practices that flourished on the edge, manifesting their importance to both early modern audiences, and to current readers and performers.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513749
ISBN:: 9781501513749
ISBN:: 9781501514029
ISBN:: 9781501518218
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2020

Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage

Lisa Hopkins

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No story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy, partly because the story of Troy was in a sense the story of England, since the Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War. Texts covered include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and The Tempest as well as plays by other authors of the period including Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501514623
ISBN:: 9781501514623
ISBN:: 9781501514500
ISBN:: 9781501518584
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 16.-17. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Fachgebiet:: Ausgewählte Themen der Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Mythen und Märchen
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications

Buch 2019

The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama

Plotting Women's Biology on the Stage

Ursula A. Potter

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This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She analyzes how playwrights employed visual and verbal clues to identify the sexual status of female characters to engage their audiences with popular concepts of women’s health; and how they satirized the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite, suggesting that men who fear it have been duped. But the study also recognizes that, as these dramatists were fully aware, merely by bringing such material to the stage so frequently, they were complicit in perpetuating such theories.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110662016
ISBN:: 9783110662016
ISBN:: 9783110660500
ISBN:: 9781580443708
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft
Fachgebiet:: Literaturwissenschaft, allgemein
Fachgebiet:: Anglo-Amerikanische Literatur
Fachgebiet:: 8.-15. Jahrhundert
Fachgebiet:: Gattungen und Medien
Fachgebiet:: Drama, Theater
Verlag:: Medieval Institute Publications