Shakespeare's Schoolroom

Shakespeare's Schoolroom PDF Author: Lynn Enterline
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Shakespeare's Schoolroom places moments of considerable emotional power in Shakespeare's poetry—portraits of what his contemporaries called "the passions"—alongside the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century English pedagogy. Humanist training in Latin grammar and rhetorical facility was designed to intervene in social reproduction, to sort out which differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below) were necessary to producing proper English "gentlemen." But the method adopted by Lynn Enterline in this book uncovers a rather different story from the one schoolmasters invented to promote the social efficacy of their pedagogical innovations. Beginning with the observation that Shakespeare frequently reengaged school techniques through the voices of those it excluded (particularly women), Enterline shows that when his portraits of "love" and "woe" betray their institutional origins, they reveal both the cost of a Latin education as well as the contradictory conditions of genteel masculinity in sixteenth-century Britain. In contrast to attempts to explain early modern emotion in relation to medical discourse, Enterline uncovers the crucial role that rhetoric and the texts of the classical past play in Shakespeare's passions. She relies throughout on the axiom that rhetoric has two branches that continuously interact: tropological (requiring formal literary analysis) and transactional (requiring social and historical analysis). Each chapter moves between grammar school archives and literary canon, using linguistic, rhetorical, and literary detail to illustrate the significant difference between what humanists claimed their methods would achieve and what the texts of at least one former schoolboy reveal about the institution's unintended literary and social consequences. When Shakespeare creates the convincing effects of character and emotion for which he is so often singled out as a precursor of "modern" subjectivity, he signals his debt to the Latin institution that granted him the cultural capital of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as their educational goal.

Shakespeare's Schoolroom

Shakespeare's Schoolroom PDF Author: Lynn Enterline
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare's Schoolroom places moments of considerable emotional power in Shakespeare's poetry—portraits of what his contemporaries called "the passions"—alongside the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century English pedagogy. Humanist training in Latin grammar and rhetorical facility was designed to intervene in social reproduction, to sort out which differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below) were necessary to producing proper English "gentlemen." But the method adopted by Lynn Enterline in this book uncovers a rather different story from the one schoolmasters invented to promote the social efficacy of their pedagogical innovations. Beginning with the observation that Shakespeare frequently reengaged school techniques through the voices of those it excluded (particularly women), Enterline shows that when his portraits of "love" and "woe" betray their institutional origins, they reveal both the cost of a Latin education as well as the contradictory conditions of genteel masculinity in sixteenth-century Britain. In contrast to attempts to explain early modern emotion in relation to medical discourse, Enterline uncovers the crucial role that rhetoric and the texts of the classical past play in Shakespeare's passions. She relies throughout on the axiom that rhetoric has two branches that continuously interact: tropological (requiring formal literary analysis) and transactional (requiring social and historical analysis). Each chapter moves between grammar school archives and literary canon, using linguistic, rhetorical, and literary detail to illustrate the significant difference between what humanists claimed their methods would achieve and what the texts of at least one former schoolboy reveal about the institution's unintended literary and social consequences. When Shakespeare creates the convincing effects of character and emotion for which he is so often singled out as a precursor of "modern" subjectivity, he signals his debt to the Latin institution that granted him the cultural capital of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as their educational goal.

Lessons from Shakespeare’s Classroom

Lessons from Shakespeare’s Classroom PDF Author: Robin Lithgow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000830136
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This volume explores the relationship between the emphasis on performance in Elizabethan humanist education and the flourishing of literary brilliance around the turn of the sixteenth century. This study asks us what lessons we can learn today from Shakespeare’s Latin grammar school. What were the cognitive benefits of an education so deeply rooted in what Demosthenes and Quintilian called "actio"—acting? Because of the vast difference between educational practice then and now, we have not often followed one essential thread: the focus on performance. This study examines the connections relevant to the education offered in schools today. This book will be of great interest to teachers, scholars, and administrators in performing arts and education.

The Children's Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509-1608

The Children's Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509-1608 PDF Author: Jeanne McCarthy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315390809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The Children’s Troupes and the Transformation of English Theater 1509–1608 uncovers the role of the children’s companies in transforming perceptions of authorship and publishing, performance, playing spaces, patronage, actor training, and gender politics in the sixteenth century. Jeanne McCarthy challenges entrenched narratives about popular playing in an era of revolutionary changes, revealing the importance of the children’s company tradition’s connection with many early plays, as well as to the spread of literacy, classicism, and literate ideals of drama, plot, textual fidelity, characterization, and acting in a still largely oral popular culture. By addressing developments from the hyper-literate school tradition, and integrating discussion of the children’s troupes into the critical conversation around popular playing practices, McCarthy offers a nuanced account of the play-centered, literary performance tradition that came to define professional theater in this period. Highlighting the significant role of the children’s company tradition in sixteenth-century performance culture, this volume offers a bold new narrative of the emergence of the London theater.

Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England

Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England PDF Author: Daniel Blank
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192886118
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Dramatic performances at the universities in early modern England have usually been regarded as insular events, completely removed from the plays of the London stage. Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England challenges that long-held notion, illuminating how an apparently secluded theatrical culture became a major source of inspiration for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While many university plays featured classical themes, others reflected upon the academic environments in which they were produced, allowing a window into the universities themselves. This window proved especially fruitful for Shakespeare, who, as this book reveals, had a sustained fascination with the universities and their inhabitants. Daniel Blank provides groundbreaking new readings of plays from throughout Shakespeare's career, illustrating how depictions of academic culture in Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, and Macbeth were shaped by university plays. Shakespeare was not unique, however. This book also discusses the impact of university drama on professional plays by Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Ben Jonson, all of whom in various ways facilitated the connection between the university stage and the London commercial stage. Yet this connection, perhaps counterintuitively, is most significant in the works of a playwright who had no formal attachment to Oxford or Cambridge. Shakespeare, this study shows, was at the center of a rich exchange between two seemingly disparate theatrical worlds.

Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons

Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons PDF Author: Travis Curtright
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611479398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
To refine a critical understanding of early modern acting styles, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons explores how the classical rhetorical tradition would inform an actor’s personation of character.

Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval

Shakespeare's Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval PDF Author: Lindsay Ann Reid
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845180
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet.

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages PDF Author: Tanya Pollard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198793111
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
"The book argues that rediscovered ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on sixteenth-century England's dramatic landscape, not only in academic and aristocratic settings, but also at the heart of the developing commercial theaters."--Introduction, p. 2.

The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare's Stratford

The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare's Stratford PDF Author: J.R. Mulryne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317029658
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The guild buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford represent a rare instance of a largely unchanged set of buildings which draw together the threads of the town’s civic life. With its multi-disciplinary perspectives on this remarkable group of buildings, this volume provides a comprehensive account of the religious, educational, legal, social and theatrical history of Stratford, focusing on the sixteenth century and Tudor Reformation. The essays interweave with one another to provide a map of the complex relationships between the buildings and their history. Opening with an investigation of the Guildhall, which served as the headquarters of the Guild of the Holy Cross until the Tudor Reformation, the book explores the building’s function as a centre of local government and community law and as a place of entertainment and education. It is beyond serious doubt that Shakespeare was a school boy here, and the many visits to the Guildhall by professional touring players during the latter half of the sixteenth-century may have prompted his acting and playwriting career. The Guildhall continues to this day to house a school for the education of secondary-level boys. The book considers educational provision during the mid sixteenth century as well as examining the interaction between touring players and the everyday politics and social life of Stratford. At the heart of the volume is archaeological and documentary research which uses up-to-date analysis and new dendrochronological investigations to interpret the buildings and their medieval wall paintings as well as proposing a possible location of the school before it transferred to the Guildhall. Together with extensive archival research into the town’s Court of Record which throws light on the commercial and social activities of the period, this rich body of research brings us closer to life as it was lived in Shakespeare’s Stratford.

The Definitive Shakespeare Companion [4 volumes]

The Definitive Shakespeare Companion [4 volumes] PDF Author: Joseph Rosenblum
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 3141

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Book Description
This expansive four-volume work gives students detailed explanations of Shakespeare's plays and poems and also covers his age, life, theater, texts, and language. Numerous excerpts from primary source historical documents contextualize his works, while reviews of productions chronicle his performance history and reception. Shakespeare's works often served to convey simple truths, but they are also complex, multilayered masterpieces. Shakespeare drew on varied sources to create his plays, and while the plays are sometimes set in worlds before the Elizabethan age, they nonetheless parallel and comment on situations in his own era. Written with the needs of students in mind, this four-volume set demystifies Shakespeare for today's readers and provides the necessary perspective and analysis students need to better appreciate the genius of his work. This indispensable ready reference examines Shakespeare's plots, language, and themes; his use of sources and exploration of issues important to his age; the interpretation of his works through productions from the Renaissance to the present; and the critical reaction to key questions concerning his writings. The book provides coverage of each key play and poems in discrete sections, with each section presenting summaries; discussions of themes, characters, language, and imagery; and clear explications of key passages. Readers will be able to inspect historical documents related to the topics explored in the work being discussed and view excerpts from Shakespeare's sources as well as reviews of major productions. The work also provides a comprehensive list of print and electronic resources suitable for student research.

Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603

Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 PDF Author: Ted Tregear
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192868497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Between 1599 and 1601, no fewer than five anthologies appeared in print with extracts from Shakespeare's works. Some featured whole poems, while others chose short passages from his poems and plays, gathered alongside lines on similar topics by his rivals and contemporaries. Appearing midway through his career, these anthologies marked a critical moment in Shakespeare's life. They testify to the reputation he had established as a poet and playwright by the end of the sixteenth century. In extracting passages from their contexts, though, they also read Shakespeare in ways that he might have imagined being read. After all, this was how early modern readers were taught to treat the texts they read, selecting choice excerpts and copying them into their notebooks. Taking its cue from these anthologies, Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 offers new readings of the formative works of Shakespeare's first decade in print, from Venus and Adonis (1593) to Hamlet (1603). It illuminates a previously neglected period in Shakespeare's career, what it calls his 'anthology period'. It investigates what these anthologies made of Shakespeare, and what he made of being anthologized. And it shows how, from the early 1590s, his works were inflected by the culture of commonplacing and anthologizing in which they were written, and in which Shakespeare, no less than his readers, was schooled. In this book, Ted Tregear explores how Shakespeare appealed to the reading habits of his contemporaries, inviting and frustrating them in turn. Shakespeare, he argues, used the practice of anthologizing to open up questions at the heart of his poems and plays: questions of classical literature and the schoolrooms in which it was taught; of English poetry and its literary inheritance; of poetry's relationship with drama; and of the afterlife he and his works might win--at least in parts.