Informed by film theory and a broad historical approach, Fatal Desire examines the theatrical representation of women in England, from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century—a period when ...for the first time female actors could perform in public. Jean I. Marsden maintains that the feminization of serious drama during this period is tied to the cultural function of theater. Women served as symbols of both domestic and imperial propriety, and so Marsden links the representation of women on the stage to the social context in which the plays appeared and to the moral and often political lessons they offered the audience. The witty heroines of comedies were usually absorbed into the social fabric by marrying similarly lighthearted gentlemen, but the heroines of tragedy suffered for their sins, real or perceived. That suffering served the dual purpose of titillating and educating the theater audience. Marsden discusses such plays as William Wycherley's Plain Dealer (1676), John Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife (1697), Thomas Otway's Orphan (1680), Thomas Southerne's Fatal Marriage (1694), and William Congreve's Mourning Bride (1697). The author also addresses tragedies written by three female playwrights, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley, and sketches developments in tragedy during the period.
Breaking new ground in the study of tragedy, early modern theatre, and literary London,Metropolitan Tragedydemonstrates that early modern tragedy emerged from the juncture of radical changes in ...London's urban fabric and the city's judicial procedures. Marissa Greenberg argues that plays by Shakespeare, Milton, Massinger, and others rework classical conventions to represent the city as a locus of suffering and loss while they reflect on actual sources of injustice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London: structural upheaval, imperial ambition, and political tyranny.
Drawing on a rich archive of printed and manuscript sources, including numerous images of England's capital, Greenberg reveals the competing ideas about the metropolis that mediated responses to theatrical tragedy. The first study of early modern tragedy as an urban genre,Metropolitan Tragedyadvances our understanding of the intersections between genre and history.
El volumen (publicado tambien con acceso libre en internet, https://digitalisdsp.uc.pt/bitstream/10316.2/44015/1/Irreligiosidad.pdf) se abre con un prologo en ingles de M. Domingo Gygax ...("Irreligiosity in Fifth-Century Athens", pp. 11-14) que sirve de presentacion y ubica los problemas fundamentales de concepto y metodo que presenta el abordaje de un tema capital en la evolución del pensamiento y las ideas de la Atenas clasica. El autor destaca cómo la ciudad intervino en los debates religiosos mientras que, de otro lado, en la cultura helenica no existia una imposición de una ortodoxia religiosa que provocase una reacción; en todo caso, por ello mismo el fenómeno pudo ser menos visible, y al mismo tiempo mas enconado en Atenas, donde mas textos estaban en circulación. A continuación, Ramón Palerm revisa en la sección siguiente ("Comedia", pp. 154-205) los loci de la obra aristofánica con escenas relativas a la divinidad (Sócrates y la impiedad; la intervención en la guerra; las nuevas condiciones económicas, etc.). Por ultimo, F. Frazier ("Regards Grecs sur L'Athenes du Vе siecle et 'L' irreligion' de Platon a Plutarque", pp. 295-357) constituye un ensayo a modo de epílogo que comienza planteando la dimensión cívica o política de la religión griega, dimensión cruzada por la dicotomía entre el pensamiento sobre el hecho religioso y los actos determinados que concretizan el mismo, todo lo cual va a determinar el tratamiento de las cuestiones de irreligiosidad.
Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation--a reformed drama--and a producer of Protestant habits of thought--a reforming drama. According to ...Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.
Labors Lostoffers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda ...reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities.
Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays,Labors Lostretrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of women's work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
As well as 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were known as 'play-patchers' because their texts were made from separate documents. This book is the first to consider ...all the papers created by authors and theatres by the time of the opening performance, recovering types of script not previously known to have existed. With chapters on plot-scenarios, arguments, playbills, prologues and epilogues, songs, staged scrolls, backstage-plots and parts, it shows how textually distinct production was from any single unified book. And, as performance documents were easily lost, relegated or reused, the story of a play's patchy creation also becomes the story of its co-authorship, cuts, revisions and additions. Using a large body of fresh evidence, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England brings a wholly new reading to printed and manuscript playbooks of the Shakespearean period, redefining what a play, and what a playwright, actually is.
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