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.
Hopkins argues the succession to the throne was a burning topic not only in the final years of Elizabeth but well into the 1630s, and drama, with its disguised identities and oblique relationship to ...reality, was a safe way to air it. Hopkins analyzes some of the ways in which plays-from Marlowe's and Shakespeare's to Webster's and Ford's-reflect, negotiate and dream the issue of the succession.
This analysis of five exemplary domestic plays-the anonymousArden of FavershamandA Warning for Fair Women(1590s), Thomas Heywood'sA Woman Killed with Kindness(1607), Thomas Middleton'sWomen Beware ...Women(ca. 1613), and Walter Mountfort'sThe Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman's Honest Wife (1632)-offers a new approach to the emerging ideology of the private and public, or what Ann C. Christensen terms "the tragedy of the separate spheres." Feminist scholarship has identified the fruitful gaps between theories and practices of household government in early modern Europe, while work on the global Renaissance attends to commercial expansion, cross-cultural encounters, and colonial settlements.Separation Scenesbrings these critical concerns together to expose the intimate and disruptive relationships between the domestic culture and business culture of early modern England.Separation Scenesargues that domestic plays make the absence of husbands for business the subject of tragedy by focusing not on where men traveled but on whom and what they left behind. Elements that critics have rightly associated with domestic tragedy-adultery, sensational murders, and the lavishly articulated operations of domestic life-define this world, which, Christensen argues, was equally shaped by the absence of husbands. Her interpretations of these domestic plays invite us to historicize and further complicate the seemingly universal binary between a feminine "private sphere" and a masculine "public sphere."Separation Scenesdemonstrates how domestic drama played an active, dynamic, and critical role in deliberating the costs of commercial travel as it disrupted domestic conduct and prompted realignments within the home.
Though individual prologues and epilogues have been treated in depth, very little scholarship has been published on early modern framing texts as a whole. The Framing Text in Early Modern English ...Drama fills a gap in the literature by examining the origins of these texts, and investigating their growing importance and influence in the theatre of the period.
This topic-led discussion of prologues and epilogues deals with the origins of these texts, the difficulty of definition, and the way in which many prologues and epilogues appear to interact on such subjects as the composition of the theatre audience and the perceived place of women in such an audience. Author Brian Schneider also examines the reasons for, and the evidence leading to, the apparently sudden burgeoning of these texts after the Restoration, when prologues and epilogues grace nearly all the dramas of the time and become a virtual cottage industry of their own.
The second section-a comprehensive list of prologues and epilogues-details play titles, playwrights, theatres and theatre companies, first performance and the earliest edition in which the framing text(s) appears. It quotes the first line of the prologue and/or epilogue and uses the printer's signature to denote the page on which the texts can be found. Further information is provided in notes appended to the relevant entry. A final section deals with 'free-floating' and 'free-standing' framing texts that appear in verse collections, manuscripts, and other publications and to which no play can be positively ascribed.
Combining original analysis with carefully compiled, comprehensive reference data, The Framing Text in Early Modern English Drama provides a genuinely new angle on the drama of early modern England.
In the early modern period, England radically expanded its participation in an economy that itself was becoming increasingly global. Yet less than twenty years after the highly profitable English ...East India Company made its first voyage, England was suffering from an economic depression, blamed largely on the shortage of coin necessary to exploit those very same profitable routes. How could there be profit in the face of so much loss, and loss in the face of so much profit? InTragicomic Redemptions, Valerie Forman contends that three seemingly unrelated domains-the development of new economic theories and practices, especially those related to global trade; the discourses of Christian redemption; and the rise of tragicomedy as the stage's most popular genre-were together crucial to the formulation of a new and paradoxical way of thinking about loss and profit in relationship to one another. Forman reads plays-including Shakespeare'sTwelfth Night,The Merchant of Venice,Pericles, andThe Winter's Tale, Fletcher'sThe Island Princess, Massinger'sThe Renegado, and Webster'sThe Devil's Law-Case-alongside a range of historical materials that provide a fuller picture of England's participation in a global economy: the writings of the country's earliest economic theorists, narrative accounts of merchants and captives in the Spice Islands and the Ottoman Empire, and documents that detail the development of the English East India Company, the Levant Company, and even the very idea of the joint-stock company. Unique in its dual focus on literary form and economic practices,Tragicomic Redemptionsboth shows how concepts fundamental to capitalism's existence, such as "free trade," and "investment," develop within a global context and reveals the exceptional place of dramatic form as a participant in the newly emerging, public discourse of economic theory.
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