Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama

Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Jeremy Lopez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511073878
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In this comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Lopez proposes that understanding the potential for theatrical failure - the way playwrights anticipated it and audiences responded to it - is crucial for understanding how the drama succeeded on the stage.

Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama

Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Jeremy Lopez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511073878
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book

Book Description
In this comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Lopez proposes that understanding the potential for theatrical failure - the way playwrights anticipated it and audiences responded to it - is crucial for understanding how the drama succeeded on the stage.

Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama

Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Jeremy Lopez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107729327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
For one hundred years the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical tradition by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions does it serve? What preceded it, and is it possible for it to become something else? Jeremy Lopez takes up these questions by tracing a history of anthologies of 'non-Shakespearean' drama from Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) through those recently published by Blackwell, Norton, and Routledge. Containing dozens of short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book will benefit those who seek a broader sense of the period's dazzling array of forms.

Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama

Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Jeremy Lopez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139436678
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book gives a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Besides providing readings of plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, it also places Shakespeare emphatically within his own theatrical context, and focuses on the relationship between the demanding repertory system of the time and the conventions and content of the plays. Lopez argues that the limitations of the relatively bare stage and non-naturalistic mode of early modern theatre would have made the potential for failure very great, and he proposes that understanding this potential for failure is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on stage. The book offers perspectives on familiar conventions such as the pun, the aside and the expository speech; and it works toward a definition of early modern theatrical genres based on the relationship between these well-known conventions and the incoherent experience of early modern theatrical narratives.

Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres

Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres PDF Author: Matthew Steggle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351922998
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Did Shakespeare's original audiences weep? Equally, while it seems obvious that they must have laughed at plays performed in early modern theatres, can we say anything about what their laughter sounded like, about when it occurred, and about how, culturally, it was interpreted? Related to both of these problems of audience behaviour is that of the stage representation of laughing, and weeping, both actions performed with astonishing frequency in early modern drama. Each action is associated with a complex set of non-verbal noises, gestures, and cultural overtones, and each is linked to audience behaviour through one of the axioms of Renaissance dramatic theory: that weeping and laughter on stage cause, respectively, weeping and laughter in the audience. This book is a study of laughter and weeping in English theatres, broadly defined, from around 1550 until their closure in 1642. It is concerned both with the representation of these actions on the stage, and with what can be reconstructed about the laughter and weeping of theatrical audiences themselves, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.

Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater

Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater PDF Author: Lauren Robertson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100922512X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Lauren Robertson's original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular. Revealing the radical, exciting instability of the early modern theater's representational practices, Robertson uncovers the uncertainty that went to the heart of playgoing experience in this period. Doubt was not merely the purview of Hamlet and other onstage characters, but was in fact constitutive of spectators' imaginative participation in performance. Within a culture in the midst of extreme epistemological upheaval, the commercial theater licensed spectators' suspension among opposed possibilities, transforming dubiety itself into exuberantly enjoyable, spectacular show. Robertson shows that the playhouse was a site for the entertainment of uncertainty in a double sense: its pleasures made the very trial of unknowing possible.

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London PDF Author: Eric Dunnum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351252631
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience. This study analyses how, out of anxiety that unruly audiences would destroy the nascent industry of professional drama in England, playwrights sought to limit the effect that their plays could have on the audience. They tried to construct playgoing through their drama in the hopes of creating a less-reactive, more pensive, and controlled playgoer. The result was the radical experimentation in dramaturgy that, in part, defines Renaissance drama. Written for scholars of Early Modern and Renaissance Drama and Theatre, Theatre History, and Early Modern and Renaissance History, this book calls for a new focus on the local economic concerns of the theatre companies as a way to understand the motivation behind the drama of early modern London.

Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642

Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558-1642 PDF Author: J. Low
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230118399
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This essay collection builds on the latest research on the topic of theatre audiences in early modern England. In broad terms, the project answers the question, 'How do we define the relationships between performance and audience?'.

Reimagining Shakespeare's Playhouse

Reimagining Shakespeare's Playhouse PDF Author: Joe Falocco
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843842416
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Numerous attempts have been made in the modern and postmodern era to recreate the staging conventions of Shakespeare's theatre, from William Poel to the founders of the New Globe. This volume examines the work of these directors, analyzing their practical successes and failures; it also engages with the ideological critiques of early modern staging advanced by scholars such as W.B. Worthen and Ric Knowles. The author argues that rather than indulging in archaism for its own sake, the movement looked backward in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century. The book begins with a re-examination of the conventional view of Poel as an antiquarian crank. Subsequent chapters are devoted to Harley Granville Barker and Nugent Monck; the author argues that while Barker's major contribution was the dubious achievement of establishing the movement's reputation as an essentially literary phenomenon, Monck took the first tentative steps toward an architectural reimagining of modern performance space, an advance which led to later triumphs in early modern staging. The book than traces the sporadic and irregular development of Tyrone Guthrie's commitment to early modern practices. The final chapter looks at how competing historical theories of playhouse design influenced the construction of the Globe, while the conclusion discusses the ongoing potential of early modern staging in the new millennium.

Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre

Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre PDF Author: Richard Preiss
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Richard Preiss presents a lively and provocative study of how the ever-popular stage clown shaped early modern playhouse theatre.

Richard II

Richard II PDF Author: Jeremy Lopez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137072741
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
This Handbook provides an introductory guide to Richard II offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of three or four key performances and productions, a survey of film and TV adaptations, a wide sampling of critical opinion and further reading.