Discoveries on the Early Modern Stage PDF Download

Author: Leslie Thomson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108494471
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
"This is a study of the dramatic use, treatment, and staging of performed 'discoveries' - actions which the theatre is uniquely able to exploit visually and explore verbally. The motif of discovery - in the now almost obsolete sense of uncovering or disclosing - is prominent in the language and action of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline plays. Visual discoveries are used repeatedly through the period by virtually every playwright, regardless of company or venue. These discoveries are of two different but related kinds: the disguise discovery - the removal of a disguise to uncover identity; and the discovery scene - the opening of curtains or doors to reveal a place or the removal of a lid or cover to effect a disclosure. This is the first analysis of staged discoveries as such; in it I show how and why these actions are essential to the way a play dramatizes and explores such interrelated matters as deception, privacy, secrecy, and truth; knowledge, justice, and renewal"--

Author: Leslie Thomson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108599729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This study of the action of discovery as plot device, visual motif, and thematic trope on the early modern stage considers an important and popular performance convention in its cultural and religious contexts. Through close examination of a number of 'discoveries' taken from a wide range of early modern plays, Leslie Thomson traverses several related disciplines, including theatre history, literary analysis, art history, and the history of the religious practices that would have influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Taking as its primary focus the performance of disguise-discoveries and discovery scenes, the analyses include considerations of how this particular device relates to genre, plot structure, language, imagery, themes, and the manipulation of playgoer expectations. With strong reference to the visual arts, and an appendix that addresses the problem of how and where discovery scenes were performed, Thomson offers an innovative perspective on the staging and meaning of early modern drama.

Author: Enrique García Santo-Tomás
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487504055
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain features essays by leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and the history of science, exploring the relationship between technical innovations and theatrical events that incorporated scientific content into dramatic productions. Focusing on Spanish dramas between 1500 and 1700, through the birth and development of its playhouses and coliseums and the phenomenal success of its major writers, this collection addresses a unique phenomenon through the most popular, versatile, and generous medium of the time. The contributors tackle subjects and disciplines as diverse as alchemy, optics, astronomy, acoustics, geometry, mechanics, and mathematics to reveal how theatre could be used to deploy scientific knowledge. While Science on Stage contributes to cultural and performance studies it also engages with issues of censorship, the effect of the Spanish Inquisition on the circulation of ideas, and the influence of the Eastern traditions in Spain.

Author: Leslie Thomson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000615650
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book reconsiders the evidence for what we know (or think we know) about early modern performance conditions. This study encourages a new recognition and treatment of certain aspects of the plays as evidence – and demonstrates the significance of the implications of that new information. This book is also an assessment of the competing narratives about the processes involved in early modern performance: about the status of manuscript playbooks, about the parts that players memorized, about the functions of the bookkeeper, about casting, about prompting, and about rehearsal practices. Leslie Thomson investigates the bases for the interdependent beliefs that an early modern player relied only on his part to prepare for a performance, that rehearsal was minimal, and that a bookkeeper compensated for these circumstances by prompting any player who was "out of his part." By focusing on often ignored (or downplayed) requirements and challenges of early modern play texts, Thomson provides evidence for answers that will foster a more nuanced and thorough understanding of original performance practices. That will, in turn, influence how we read, study, and edit the plays. This exploration will be of great interest to theatre and performance researchers, graduate students, teachers of early modern drama at the undergraduate and graduate levels, performers, directors, editors.

Author: Henry S. Turner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199641358
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.

Author: Mr Tim Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 140947898X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which–though many of them are considered of great literary worth–were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

Author: Pascale Aebischer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521193354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Recent performances of early modern plays are analysed in essays by practitioners and academics, featuring critical, pedagogical and practical approaches.

Author: Andrew Bozio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019258572X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Thinking Through Place on the Early Modern English Stage argues that environment and embodied thought continually shaped one another in the performance of early modern English drama. It demonstrates this, first, by establishing how characters think through their surroundings — not only how they orient themselves within unfamiliar or otherwise strange locations, but also how their environs function as the scaffolding for perception, memory, and other forms of embodied thought. It then contends that these moments of thinking through place theorise and thematise the work that playgoers undertook in reimagining the stage as the setting of the dramatic fiction. By tracing the relationship between these two registers of thought in such plays as The Malcontent, Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine, King Lear, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Bartholomew Fair, this book shows that drama makes visible the often invisible means by which embodied subjects acquire a sense of their surroundings. It also reveals how, in doing so, theatre altered the way that playgoers perceived, experienced, and imagined place in early modern England.

Author: Tim Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317079787
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which-though many of them are considered of great literary worth-were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

Author: Dr James Dougal Fleming
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409478688
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The early modern period used to be known as the Age of Discovery. More recently, it has been troped as an age of invention. But was the invention/discovery binary itself invented, or discovered? This volume investigates the possibility that it was invented, through a range of early modern knowledge practices, centered on the emergence of modern natural science. From Bacon to Galileo, from stagecraft to math, from martyrology to romance, contributors to this interdisciplinary collection examine the period's generation of discovery as an absolute and ostensibly neutral standard of knowledge-production. They further investigate the hermeneutic implications for the epistemological authority that tends, in modernity, still to be based on that standard. The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700 is a set of attempts to think back behind discovery, considered as a decisive trope for modern knowledge.