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Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526159910
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.
Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526159910
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Get Book
Book Description
Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.
Author: Murat Ögütcü
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350300470
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama. This volume re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting representations of the East were communicated on stage through the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance effects. The collection emphasizes these material aspects of dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John Fletcher's The Island Princess.
Author: Tanya Pollard
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780199270835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Draws upon both medical and literary research to show the preoccupation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries with drugs and poisons in their dramas.
Author: Miranda Wilson
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611485398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Poison's Dark Works in Renaissance England considers the ways sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fears of poisoning prompt new models for understanding the world even as the fictive qualities of poisoning frustrate attempts at certainty. Whether English writers invoke literal poisons, as they do in so many revenge dramas, homicide cases, and medical documents, or whether poisoning appears more metaphorically, as it does in a host of theological, legal, philosophical, popular, and literary works, this particular, “invisible” weapon easily comes to embody the darkest elements of a more general English appetite for imagining the hidden correlations between the seen and the unseen. This book is an inherently interdisciplinary project. This book works from the premise that accounts of poisons and their operations in Renaissance texts are neither incidental nor purely sensational; rather, they do moral, political, and religious work which can best be assessed when we consider poisoning as part of the texture of Renaissance culture. Placing little known or less-studied texts (medical reports, legal accounts, or anonymous pamphlets) alongside those most familiar to scholars and the larger public (such as poetry by Edmund Spenser and plays by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton) allows us to appreciate the almost gravitational pull exerted by the notion of poison in the Renaissance. Considering a variety of texts, written for disparate audiences, and with diverse purposes, makes apparent the ways this crime functions as both a local problem to be solved and as an apt metaphor for the complications of epistemology.
Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317102762
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is staged and what the representational strategies and techniques might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.
Author: Enrique García Santo-Tomás
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487504055
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain features essays by leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and the history of science, exploring the relationship between technical innovations and theatrical events that incorporated scientific content into dramatic productions. Focusing on Spanish dramas between 1500 and 1700, through the birth and development of its playhouses and coliseums and the phenomenal success of its major writers, this collection addresses a unique phenomenon through the most popular, versatile, and generous medium of the time. The contributors tackle subjects and disciplines as diverse as alchemy, optics, astronomy, acoustics, geometry, mechanics, and mathematics to reveal how theatre could be used to deploy scientific knowledge. While Science on Stage contributes to cultural and performance studies it also engages with issues of censorship, the effect of the Spanish Inquisition on the circulation of ideas, and the influence of the Eastern traditions in Spain.
Author: Nadine Akkerman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300277105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
A fascinating exploration of the devious tricks and ingenious tools used by early modern spies—from ciphers to counterfeiting, invisible inks to assassination Early modern Europe was a hotbed of espionage, where spies, spy-catchers, and conspirators pitted their wits against each other in deadly games of hide and seek. Theirs was a dangerous trade—only those who mastered the latest techniques would survive. In this engaging, accessible account, Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the methods spies actually used in the period, including disguises, invisible inks, and even poisons. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources, they show how understanding the tricks and tools of espionage allows us to re-imagine well-known stories such as the Babington and Gunpowder plots. Exposing the murky world of spies, they demonstrate how the technological innovations of petty criminals, secretaries, and other hitherto invisible actors shaped the fate of some of history’s most iconic figures. Spycraft explains how early modern spies sought to protect their own secrets while exposing those of their enemies, showing the reader how to follow in their footsteps.
Author: Professor Peter Hyland
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409478777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays, and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study Peter Hyland considers a range of practical issues related to the performance of disguise. He goes on to examine various conceptual issues that provide a background to theatrical disguise (the relation of self and "other", the meaning of mask and performance). He looks at many disguise plays under three broad headings. He considers moral issues (the almost universal association of disguise with "evil"); social issues (sumptuary legislation, clothing, and the theatre, and constructions of class, gender and national or racial identity); and aesthetic issues (disguise as an emblem of theatre, and the significance of disguise for the dramatic artist). The study serves to examine the significant ways in which disguise devices have been used in early modern drama in England.
Author: Charlotte Scott
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350259845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
Shakespeare / Nature sets new agendas for the study of nature in Shakespeare's work. Offering a rich exploration of the intersections between the human and non-human worlds, the chapters focus on the contested and persuasive language of nature, both as organic matter and cultural conditioning. Rooted in close textual analysis and historical acuity, this collection addresses Shakespeare's works through the many ways in which 'nature' performs, as a cultural category, a moral marker and a set of essential conditions through which the human may pass, as well as affect. Addressing the complex conditions of the play worlds, the chapters explore the assorted forms through which Shakespeare's nature makes sense of its narratives and supports, upholds or contests its story-telling. Over the course of the collection, the contributors examine plays including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, Timon of Athens and many more. They discuss them through the various lenses of philosophy, historicism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cosmography, geography, sexuality, linguistics, environmentalism, feminism and robotics, to provide new and nuanced readings of the intersectional terms of both meaning and matter. Approaching 'nature' in all its multiplicity, this collection sets out to examine the divergent and complex ways in which the human and non-human worlds intersect and the development of a language of symbiosis that attempts to both control and create the terms of human authority. It offers an entirely new approach to the subject of nature, bringing together disparate methods that have previously been pursued independently to offer a shared investment in the intersections between the human and non-human worlds and how these discourses shape and condition the emotional, organic, cultural and psychological landscapes of Shakespeare's play worlds.
Author: Todd Howard James Pettigrew
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874139518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
By Shakespeare's time, the debate over legitimate medical practice had become vociferous and public. The powerful College of Physicians fought hard to discredit some and rein in others, but many resisted, denied, or ignored its authority. Dramatists did not fail to notice the turmoil, nor did they fail to comment on it - and no one commented more profoundly on stage than William Shakespeare. Going beyond the usual questions posed about Shakespeare and medicine, this study, which won the first Jay L. Halio Prize in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies, explores Shakespeare's response to the early modern struggle for control of English medical practice. It does not rehearse the fundamentals of early modern medical thought such as the humoral system that have been more than adequately covered numerous times elsewhere. Instead, it undertakes a reading of popular English medical tracts in an effort to reconstruct the terms in which medical practitioners of all kinds were understood. injury were busy hearing such stories, and in a time of spectacular outbreaks of infectious disease, in a time of religious transition, and in a time of shifting modes of political power, such stories held especial fascination. Todd Pettigrew is an Associate Professor Cape Breton University.
