Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage

Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage PDF Author: Cynthia Lowenthal
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809324620
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, Cynthia Lowenthal explores identity--especially masculinity and femininity, English and "foreign," middle-class and aristocratic--as it is enacted, idealized, deployed, and redefined on the late-seventeenth-century British stage. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways the theatre contributed to new and often shifting early modern definitions of the boundaries of nation, status, and gender. The first portion of the book focuses on the playwrights' presentations of idealized men and the comic ridicule of male bodies and behaviors that fall short of the ideal. Of special interest are those moments when playwrights use stereotypes of national character, particularly the Spaniards and Turks, as examples of the worst in male behavior, judgments that are always inflected with elements of class or status inconsistency. The second portion of Lowenthal's discussion focuses on playwrights' attempts to redefine the idealized woman. Lowenthal investigates the ways that an extratheatrical discourse surrounding the actresses, one that essentialized them as sexual bodies demanding scrutiny and requiring containment, also serves to secure for them an equally essential aristocratic status. Anchored by Manley's Royal Mischief, Lowenthal's reading reveals that even a woman playwright's attempts to represent female subjectivity or interiority at odds with the surfaces of the body are doomed to return to those same surfaces. By focusing on a new, early modern lability of identity and by reading less canonical women playwrights, such as Manley and Pix, alongside established male playwrights such as Dryden and Wycherley, Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage yields both a more accurate and a more compelling picture of the cultural dynamics at work on the early modern stage.

Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage

Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage PDF Author: Cynthia Lowenthal
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809324620
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, Cynthia Lowenthal explores identity--especially masculinity and femininity, English and "foreign," middle-class and aristocratic--as it is enacted, idealized, deployed, and redefined on the late-seventeenth-century British stage. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways the theatre contributed to new and often shifting early modern definitions of the boundaries of nation, status, and gender. The first portion of the book focuses on the playwrights' presentations of idealized men and the comic ridicule of male bodies and behaviors that fall short of the ideal. Of special interest are those moments when playwrights use stereotypes of national character, particularly the Spaniards and Turks, as examples of the worst in male behavior, judgments that are always inflected with elements of class or status inconsistency. The second portion of Lowenthal's discussion focuses on playwrights' attempts to redefine the idealized woman. Lowenthal investigates the ways that an extratheatrical discourse surrounding the actresses, one that essentialized them as sexual bodies demanding scrutiny and requiring containment, also serves to secure for them an equally essential aristocratic status. Anchored by Manley's Royal Mischief, Lowenthal's reading reveals that even a woman playwright's attempts to represent female subjectivity or interiority at odds with the surfaces of the body are doomed to return to those same surfaces. By focusing on a new, early modern lability of identity and by reading less canonical women playwrights, such as Manley and Pix, alongside established male playwrights such as Dryden and Wycherley, Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage yields both a more accurate and a more compelling picture of the cultural dynamics at work on the early modern stage.

Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood Remarriage Films

Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood Remarriage Films PDF Author: Elizabeth Kraft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317064712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
In Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood Remarriage Films, Elizabeth Kraft brings the canon of Restoration comedy into the conversation initiated by Stanley Cavell in his book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Before there could be imagined remarriages of the sort Cavell documents, there had to be imagined marriages of equality. Such imagined marriages were first mapped out on the Restoration stage by witty pairs such as Harriet and Dorimant, Millamant and Mirabell, and Alithea and Harcourt who are precursors of the central couples in films such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and The Lady Eve. In considering the Restoration comedy canon in one-on-one discourse with the Hollywood remarriage comedy canon, Kraft demonstrates the indebtedness of the twentieth-century films to the Restoration dramatic texts-and the philosophical richness of both canons as they explore the nature and significance of marriage as pursuit of moral perfectionism. Her book will be of interest to specialists in Restoration drama and film scholars.

The Encyclopedia of British Literature, 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of British Literature, 3 Volume Set PDF Author: Gary Day
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444330209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1524

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Book Description
Provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the poetry, drama, fiction, and literary and cultural criticism produced from the Restoration of the English monarchy to the onset of the French Revolution Comprises over 340 entries arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes Written by an international team of leading and emerging scholars Features an impressive scope and range of subjects: from courtship and circulating libraries, to the works of Samuel Johnson and Sarah Scott Includes coverage of both canonical and lesser-known authors, as well as entries addressing gender, sexuality, and other topics that have previously been underrepresented in traditional scholarship Represents the most comprehensive resource available on this period, and an indispensable guide to the rich diversity of British writing that ushered in the modern literary era 3 Volumes www.literatureencyclopedia.com

Ways of the World

Ways of the World PDF Author: Laura J. Rosenthal
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150175159X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Ways of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments—global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication—this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period—including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers—helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.

Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court

Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court PDF Author: J. Webster
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403980284
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism through reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Webster argues that libertines, both real and imagined, performed traditionally secretive acts, including excessive drinking, sex, sedition, and sacrilege, in the public sphere. This eruption of the private into the public challenged a Stuart ideology that distinguished between the nation's public life and the king's and his subjects' private consciences.

Outward Appearances

Outward Appearances PDF Author: Will Pritchard
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838756881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Elucidates early modern attitudes toward women's public display. This title presents a cultural study that draws on a range of literary and non-literary texts from 1650-1700 to revisit the sites where women appeared most prominently: the playhouse, the park, and the New Exchange (a shopping arcade in the Strand).

Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London

Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London PDF Author: Mark Stanley Dawson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521848091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The book examines how gentility was portrayed at London's theatres during the early modern era.

Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage

Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage PDF Author: Hanna Walsdorf
Publisher: Frank & Timme GmbH
ISBN: 3732903737
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
The Turkish ceremony in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme has been popular with audiences for almost 350 years and remains one of the bestknown scenes of early modern French theatre. This newly researched volume spotlights the Turkish ceremony in its original technicolor, presenting numerous important discoveries that have never before been published. It shows that even in a field as thoroughly investigated as the collaboration between Molière and Lully at the court of Louis XIV, there is still much new source material to be discovered, and many new connections to be made. As the multidisciplinary essays examine the burlesque Turkish scene from a social, political, textual and iconographic view point they unearth, time and again, flaws, omissions and errors transmitted in earlier scholarship. Ritual Design is a must-have volume that sets the record straight.

Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre

Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre PDF Author: Nancy Copeland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351898248
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre studies the representation of gender in four of the most important plays by the leading professional women playwrights of the late Stuart period. Behn's The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686) and Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) are first placed in their original theatrical and cultural contexts and then studied through subsequent productions and adaptations extending from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. The detailed analysis of these plays is framed by a discussion of the cultural position of the playwrights and the kind of comedy they wrote. The survival of these plays in the repertoire offers an unusual opportunity to examine the theatrical 'double life' of works by early women playwrights. The lengthy production histories of these comedies placed them in dialogue with radically different ideas of appropriate and permissible behavior for both women and men. The resulting productions, alterations, and adaptations included both feminist reinterpretations and recuperations of the plays' challenges to dominant meanings of gender. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of dramatic literature, theatre, and women's studies.

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage PDF Author: Jan Sewell
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030238288
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 850

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Book Description
This book brings together nearly 40 academics and theatre practitioners to chronicle and celebrate the courage, determination and achievements of women on stage across the ages and around the globe. The collection stretches from ancient Greece to present-day Australasia via the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, India, South Africa and Japan, offering a series of analytical snapshots of women performers, their work and the conditions in which they produced it. Individual chapters provide in-depth consideration of specific moments in time and geography while the volume as a whole and its juxtapositions stimulate consideration of the bigger picture, underlining the challenges women have faced across cultures in establishing themselves as performers and the range of ways in which they gained access to the stage. Organised chronologically, the volume looks not just to the past but the future: it challenges the very notions of ‘history’, ‘stage’ and even the definition of ‘women’ itself.