Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy

Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy PDF Author: Iman Sheeha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100007451X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy considerably advances existing scholarship on the institution of service in early modern culture and as represented on the early modern stage. With its focus on the homes of the middling sorts, to whom the protagonists of domestic tragedy belong, the book expands our understanding of employer-servant relationships beyond elite and aristocratic circles, the focus of previous studies. Drawing on early modern advice literature, household guides, domestic manuals, sermons, treatises, proverbs, mothers’ legacies, funeral sermons, diaries, letters, and jest books as well as making use of the recent findings by social and cultural historians of early modern England, the book examines the consequences of disordered domesticity for the master-servant relationship. This study nuances the picture of domestic servants constructed by both early modern moralists and modern scholarship, arguing against overarching, reductive narratives. The book argues that the experience of household service as depicted in domestic tragedy, like in real life, was complex and varied and that there was no typical experience of service.

Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy

Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy PDF Author: Iman Sheeha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100007451X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy considerably advances existing scholarship on the institution of service in early modern culture and as represented on the early modern stage. With its focus on the homes of the middling sorts, to whom the protagonists of domestic tragedy belong, the book expands our understanding of employer-servant relationships beyond elite and aristocratic circles, the focus of previous studies. Drawing on early modern advice literature, household guides, domestic manuals, sermons, treatises, proverbs, mothers’ legacies, funeral sermons, diaries, letters, and jest books as well as making use of the recent findings by social and cultural historians of early modern England, the book examines the consequences of disordered domesticity for the master-servant relationship. This study nuances the picture of domestic servants constructed by both early modern moralists and modern scholarship, arguing against overarching, reductive narratives. The book argues that the experience of household service as depicted in domestic tragedy, like in real life, was complex and varied and that there was no typical experience of service.

Staging the Servant

Staging the Servant PDF Author: Iman Sheeha
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England

Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England PDF Author: Catherine Richardson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9781847791870
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In a theatre which self-consciously cultivated its audiences' imagination, how and what did playgoers 'see' on the stage? This book reconstructs one aspect of that imaginative process. It considers a range of printed and documentary evidence - the majority previously unpublished - for the way ordinary individuals thought about their houses and households. It then explores how writers of domestic tragedies engaged those attitudes to shape their representations of domesticity. It therefore offers a new method for understanding theatrical representations, based around a truly interdisciplinary study of the interaction between literary and historical methods. The plays she cites include Arden of Faversham, Two Lamentable Tragedies, A Woman Killed With Kindness, and A Yorkshire Tragedy.

'Household Business'

'Household Business' PDF Author: Viviana Comensoli
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442658010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The domestic play flourished on the English popular stage during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its roots were predominantly native, rather than classical, and its mainspring was the staging of domestic conflict amongst English characters from the middle ranks of society. 'Household Business' traces the genre's origins in the cycle plays of medieval England and examines its aesthetic configurations in relation to extra-literary discourses and practices that underwrote Renaissance ideologies of private life. At a time when the orthodox view of the family defined it as the foundation of the social order, a number of domestic dramas took a more critical perspective, stressing the contradictions and struggles that attend marriage and the patriarchal family. In addition to well-known domestic dramas as A Woman Killed with Kindness, Arden of Feversham, The Witch of Edmonton, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, Viviana Comensoli analyzes less well-studied plays as A Warning for Fair Women, Two Lamentable Tragedies, and The Late Lancashire Witches. The book also provides an extensive and timely assessment of domestic comedy, demonstrating how plays such as The London Prodigal, The Fair Maid of Bristow, and The Honest Whore (Parts I and II) resist homiletic paradigms in favour of a more dialectical dramaturgy.

Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies

Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies PDF Author: Emma Whipday
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474039
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Reassess the relationship between Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and the emerging genre of domestic tragedy by other early modern playwrights.

Economies of Early Modern Drama

Economies of Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Anne Enderwitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192692224
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book provides new insights into how theatre responded to changing economic practices and structures. It reviews discourses on household management and commerce to create a rich context for the discussion of socio-economic actions and transactions in Macbeth, Othello, and Timon of Athens, as well as in city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. By approaching discourses on economy and commerce as complementary, the book opens up a diverse field of socio-economic practices, including the gendered division of duties in the household, new modes of valuation, and evolving credit instruments. Theatre provides unique access to this field. In contrast to practical and policy-oriented discourses, it addresses socio-economic change and its vicissitudes in a spirit of experimentation, testing the ethical limits of socio-economic action and accustoming audiences to the demands of a changing socio-economic reality. Theatre thus offers a vital contribution to the prehistory of political economy. On the London stages, self-interest emerges as a key motive of socio-economic action, and theatre playfully explores its ambiguous status as a partly rational and partly excessive force that has a new ordering function but also creates social conflict. At the same time, by staging the contradictory demands of ethics and efficiency in economic decision-making, early modern plays offer access to a changing understanding of prudence that has a Machiavellian touch: by aligning with the pursuit of private interest, prudence sheds some of its ethical content and becomes foremost an instrumental faculty.

Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader

Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader PDF Author: Peter Kirwan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350270199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
One of the earliest domestic tragedies, Arden of Faversham is a powerful Elizabethan drama based on the real-life murder of Thomas Arden. This Critical Reader presents the first collection of essays specifically focused upon Arden of Faversham. It highlights the way in which this important play from the early 1590s stands at several different critical intersections. Focused research chapters propose new directions for exploring the play in the light of ecocriticism, genre studies, critical race studies and narratives of dispossession. It also looks forward to Arden of Faversham's role and status in a less author-centred critical climate. Chapters explore how this anonymous and canonically marginal play has been approached in the past by scholars and theatre-makers and the frameworks that have offered productive insight into its unique features. The volume includes chapters covering a wide range of critical discourses and resources available for its study, as well as offering practical approaches to the play in the classroom.

Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind

Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind PDF Author: Isabel Jaén
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135185545X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andrés Laguna, Andrés Velásquez, Marsilio Ficino, and Gómez Pereira. The editors bring together humanists and scientists: literary scholars and doctors whose interdisciplinary research integrates diverse types of sources (philosophical and medical treatises, natural histories, rhetoric manuals, pharmacopoeias, etc.) alongside Cervantes’s works to examine themes and areas including emotion, human development, animal vs. human consciousness, pathologies of the mind, and mind-altering substances. Their chapters trace the cognitive themes and points of inquiry that Cervantes shares with other early modern thinkers, showing how he both echoes and contributes to early modern views of the mind.

Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England

Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England PDF Author: Alice Equestri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000424995
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended ‘irrationality’ entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others’ perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools? Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools’ characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.

The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850

The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 PDF Author: Sara Pennell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441191860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Tracing the emergence of the domestic kitchen from the 17th to the middle of the 19th century, Sara Pennell explores how the English kitchen became a space of specialised activity, sociability and strife. Drawing upon texts, images, surviving structures and objects, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600-1850 opens up the early modern English kitchen as an important historical site in the construction of domestic relations between husband and wife, masters, mistresses and servants and householders and outsiders; and as a crucial resource in contemporary heritage landscapes.