Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage PDF Download

Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514504
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
No story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy, partly because the story of Troy was in a sense the story of England, since the Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War. Texts covered include Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and The Tempest as well as plays by other authors of the period including Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher.

Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526159910
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.

Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.

Author: Janice Valls-Russell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135012589X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Why does Bassanio compare himself to Jason? What is Hecuba to Hamlet? Is the mechanicals' staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe story funny or sad? This dictionary elucidates Shakespeare's use of mythological references in an early modern context, while bringing them to life for today's audiences and readers, at a time of renewed critical interest in the reception of the classics and fascination with classical mythology in popular culture. It is also a precious tool for practitioners who may not always know quite what to make of mythological references. Mythological figures, creatures, places and stories crowd Shakespeare's plays and poems, featuring as allusions, poetic analogies, inset shows, scene settings and characters or plots in their own right. Most of these references were familiar to Shakespeare's spectators and readers, who knew them from the writings of Ovid, Virgil and other classical authors, or indirectly through translations, commentaries, ballads and iconography. This dictionary illustrates how, far from being isolated, a mythological reference may resonate with the poetics of the text and its structure, cast light on characters and contexts, and may therefore be worth exploring onstage in a variety of ways. The 200 headings correspond to words and names actually used by Shakespeare: individual figures (Dido, Venus, Hercules), categories (Amazons, Centaurs, nymphs, satyrs), places (Colchos, Troy). Medium and longer entries also cover early modern usage and critical analysis in a cross-disciplinary approach that includes reception, textual, performance, gender and political studies.

Author: Marco Duranti
Publisher: Skenè. Texts and Studies
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
In sixteenth-century England only two Greek plays in Greek were published: Euripides’ Troades (1575) and Aristophanes’ Equites (1593). This book raises questions on the scarceness of editions of Greek dramas and their late appearance in the English Renaissance, compared to continental editorial practices. It also seeks to reconstruct the intellectual and political context in which these two dramas were published. To this end, it examines the paratexts, especially the prefatory letters addressed either to patrons or to the readers, contained in contemporary Greek grammars and catechisms. Troades and Equites were probably published for educational purposes and their lack of paratexts invites further investigation as to the status of knowledge of Greek and how these editions were to be used in teaching. Against this backdrop, Troades and Equites appear as part and parcel of a humanistic programme connected with the education of the ruling class. The book shows that the Elizabethan age witnessed a growing interest in Greek as part of an overall project of consolidation of the Church of England and the monarchy, inspired by Protestant nationalism. In this context, reading and staging Greek dramas was regarded as a means to acquire rhetorical, ethical, philosophical, and political knowledge. These paratexts help us to understand the role of Greek and Greek literature held in the making of modern England.

Author: Betine van Zyl Smit
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118347773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama offers a series of original essays that represent a comprehensive overview of the global reception of ancient Greek tragedies and comedies from antiquity to the present day. Represents the first volume to offer a complete overview of the reception of ancient drama from antiquity to the present Covers the translation, transmission, performance, production, and adaptation of Greek tragedy from the time the plays were first created in ancient Athens through the 21st century Features overviews of the history of the reception of Greek drama in most countries of the world Includes chapters covering the reception of Greek drama in modern opera and film

Author: Jonathan Gil Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521032094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the material, economic and dramatic implications of stage properties in early modern English drama. The essays in this volume, written by a team of distinguished scholars in the field, offer valuable insights and historical evidence concerning the forms of production, circulation and exchange that brought such diverse properties as sacred garments, household furnishings, pawned objects, and even false beards onto the stage.

Author: Glynne Wickham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136288325
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
This volume forms part of the 5 volume set Early English Stages 1300-1660. This set examines the history of the development of dramatic spectacle and stage convention in England from the beginning of the fourteenth century to 1660.

Author: Margreta de Grazia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022678536X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism. Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present. In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project. To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.

Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317036735
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Caesarian power was a crucial context in the Renaissance, as rulers in Europe, Russia and Turkey all sought to appropriate Caesarian imagery and authority, but it has been surprisingly little explored in scholarship. In this study Lisa Hopkins explores the way in which the stories of the Caesars, and of the Julio-Claudians in particular, can be used to figure the stories of English rulers on the Renaissance stage. Analyzing plays by Shakespeare and a number of other playwrights of the period, she demonstrates how early modern English dramatists, using Roman modes of literary representation as cover, commented on the issues of the day and critiqued contemporary monarchs.