Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater PDF Download

Author: Matteo A. Pangallo
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249410
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Using a range of familiar and lesser-known print and manuscript plays, as well as literary accounts and documentary evidence, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater shows how these playgoers wrote and revised to address what they assumed to be the needs of actors, readers, and the Master of the Revels; how they understood playhouse materials and practices; and how they crafted poetry for theatrical effects. The book also situates them in the context of the period's concepts of, and attitudes toward, playgoers' participation in the activity of playmaking. --Publisher description.

Author: Gary Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198185707
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1185

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Book Description
A comprehensive companion to 'The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton', providing detailed introductions to and full editorial apparatus for the works themselves as well as a wealth of information about Middleton's historical and literary context.

Author: Joanne Rochester
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351898183
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly staged plays-within and other metatheatrical inserts. Such works present fictionalized spectators as well as performers, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of the interpretive work of a spectator as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about early modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. This study examines on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Philip Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Each play presents a different form of metatheatrical inset, from the plays-within of The Roman Actor (1626), to the masques-within of The City Madam (1632) to the titular miniature portrait of The Picture (1629), moving thematically from spectator interpretations of dramatic performance, the visual spectacle of the masque to staged 'readings' of static visual art. All three forms present a dramatization of the process of examination, and allow an analysis of Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.

Author: Stanley Wells
Publisher:
ISBN: 0192806386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Compiled by the general editor of The Oxford Shakespeare, and one of the best-known authorities on the playwright's works, this dictionary offers up-to-date information on all aspects of Shakespeare, both in his own time and in later ages. The wide-ranging entries cover Shakespeare's plays, as well as everything from famous actors, writers, and directors connected with Shakespeare, to theatres, historical figures and places of particular interest relating to his life and work. The dictionary also includes box features of passages on Shakespeare by other famous authors, from Dr Johnson and Jane Austin to Bernard Levin and Virginia Woolf. Ideal reference for the student, actor, or director, and fascinating browsing for the general reader interested in Shakespeare's life and work.

Author: Paul Yachnin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280939X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
To many of their contemporaries, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were little more than artisanal craftsmen, "stage-wrights" who wrote plays for money, to be performed in common playhouses and in a manner often antithetical to what Jonson himself viewed as the higher calling of poetry. In response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism, Paul Yachnin contends, players and dramatists alike had promulgated the idea of drama's irrelevance, creating a recreational theater that failed to influence its audience in any purposeful way. In Stage-Wrights Yachnin shows how Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton struggled to reclaim not only the importance of their art, but their own social legitimacy as well as through the reshaping of the commercial theater. His bold readings of their works unveil the strategies by which they sought power from their privileged but powerless position on the margins. Adopting a hermeneutical approach, he explores a wide range of historical evidence to describe how English Renaissance drama depicted the world in ways refracted by the interests of the playing companies; throughout, he challenges recent historicist models that have overrated the importance of dramatic productions to society and its institutions of authority. Paul Yachnin offers a new way of understanding dramatic texts in relation to their social history. In showing how the efforts of three playwrights helped shape the area of discourse we now call "the literary," Stage-Wrights represents both a major rereading of the place of theater in Shakespeare's London and an important clarification of the social context of contemporary criticism.

Author: John Brewer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136190775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 630

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Book Description
Original historical and literary case studies Distinguished contributors from different fields - law, art history, literature Challenging and sophisticated theory International perspective First book in series brilliantly reviewed

Author: Luke Andrew Wilson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804734141
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Early modern Britain witnessed a transformation in legal reasoning about human volition and intentional action. Examining the relation between law and theater in this period, this book reads plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, and others to demonstrate how legal understanding of willful human action pervades 16th- and 17th-century English drama.

Author: Russ McDonald
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312248802
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Providing a unique combination of well-written, up-to-date background information and intriguing selections from primary documents, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare introduces students to the topics most important to the study of Shakespeare in their full historical and cultural context. This new edition contains many new documents, particularly by women and other marginalized voices from the early modern period. There is also a new chapter on Shakespeare in performance, which introduces students to the great variety of productions of Shakespeare's works over the centuries.

Author: Darryll Grantley
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810880288
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
British theatre has a greater tradition than any other, having started all the way back in 1311 and still going strong today. But that is too much for one book to cover, so this volume deals with early theatre and has a cut-off date in 1899. Still, this is almost six centuries, centuries during which British theatre not only developed but produced some of the greatest playwrights of all time and anywhere, including obviously Shakespeare but also Marlowe and Shaw. And they wrote some of the finest plays ever, which are known around the world. So there is plenty for this book to cover, just with the playwrights, plays and actors, but it also has information on stagecraft and theatres, as well as the historical and political background. This book has over 1,183 entries in the dictionary section, these being mainly on playwrights and plays, but others as well including managers and critics, and also on specific theatres, legislative acts and some technical jargon. Then there are entries on the different genres, from comedy to tragedy and everything in between. Inevitably, the chronology is quite long as it has a long period to cover and the introduction provides the necessary overview. The Historical Dictionary of Early British Theatre concludes with a pretty massive bibliography. That will be of use to particularly assiduous researchers, but this book itself is a good place to start any research since it covers periods that are far less well-known and documented, and ordinary theatre-goers will also find useful information.

Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524705624
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.