Penitent Brothellers PDF Download

Author: Herbert Jack Heller
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137019
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
"Panitent Brothellers focuses on the recurring incidents of repentance and conversion in Thomas Middleton's major comedies. Panitent Brothel's conversion in a Mad World, My Masters and Sir Walter Whorehound's repentance in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside are familiar examples of behavior that, while having precedents with St. Augustine and St. Paul, had been newly described by Luther and Calvin." "This study emphasizes close readings of Middleton's city comedies to reveal the importance of repentance and conversion in his theology."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author: E. Levy-Navarro
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This book offers the first sustained examination of fatness in the early modern period. Using readings of such major figures as Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton, this book considers alternative ways that fat was constructed before the introduction of the modern pathologized category of 'obesity'.

Author: David Nicol
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442696753
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Can the inadvertent clashes between collaborators produce more powerful effects than their concordances? For Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, the playwriting team best known for their tragedy The Changeling, disagreements and friction proved quite beneficial for their work. This first full-length study of Middleton and Rowley uses their plays to propose a new model for the study of collaborative authorship in early modern English drama. David Nicol highlights the diverse forms of collaborative relationships that factor into a play’s meaning, including playwrights, actors, companies, playhouses, and patrons. This kaleidoscopic approach, which views the plays from all these perspectives, throws new light on the Middleton-Rowley oeuvre and on early modern dramatic collaboration as a whole.

Author: Lieke Stelling
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108757243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Few subjects of the English stage have proved more alluring and enduring than religious conversion. The emergence of the Elizabethan theatre marked a profound shift in the way in which conversion was presented. If medieval drama had encouraged conversion without reservation, early Elizabethan plays started to question it. Considering over forty canonical and lesser known works, this study argues that more so than any other medium, early modern drama engaged with the question of the possibility of undergoing a radical transformation in faith and presented the period's understanding of it as fundamentally unsettled. Offering the first cross-religious exploration of conversion in early modern English drama, and presenting a new reading of William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, Lieke Stelling reveals telling patterns in the stage's treatment of conversion and religious identity.

Author: Dieter Mehl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351910698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
With the publication of Brian Gibbons's Jacobean City Comedy thirty-five years ago, the urban satires by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton attained their 'official status as a Renaissance subgenre' that was distinct, by its farcical humour and ironic tone, from 'citizen comedy' or 'London drama' more generally. This retrospective genre-building has proved immensely fruitful in the study of early modern English drama; and although city comedies may not yet rival Shakespeare's plays in the amount of editorial work and critical acclaim they receive, both the theatrical contexts and the dramatic complexity of the genre itself, and its interrelations with Shakespearean drama justly command an increasing level of attention. Looking at a broad range of plays written between the 1590s and the 1630s - master-pieces of the genre like Eastward Ho, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Dutch Courtesan and The Devil is an Ass, blends of romance and satire like The Shoemaker's Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and bourgeois oddities in the Shakespearean manner like The London Prodigal - the twelve essays in this volume re-examine city comedy in the light of recently foregrounded historical contexts such as early modern capitalism, urban culture, the Protestant Reformation, and playhouse politics. Further, they explore the interrelations between city comedy and Shakespearean comedy both from the perspective of author rivalry and in terms of modern adaptations: the twenty-first-century concept of 'popular Shakespeare' (above all in the movie sector) seems to realign the comparatively time- and placeless Shakespearean drama with the gritty, noisy and bustling urban scene that has been city comedy's traditional preserve.

Author: Mark Kaethler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton’s dramatic works as responses to James I’s governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of Middleton’s writings, ranging from his first extant play The Phoenix (1604) to his scandalous finale A Game at Chess (1624). In the course of this investigation, the author identifies that although Middleton’s drama spurs political awareness and questions authority, it nevertheless simultaneously promotes alternative structures of power, which manifest as misogyny and white supremacy.

Author: Gary Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199559880
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 690

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Book Description
The 37 essays in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton reinterpret the English Renaissance through the lens of one of its most original, and least understood, geniuses. Shakespeare's younger contemporary and collaborator, Middleton wrote modern comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies, history plays, masques, pageants, pamphlets, and poetry. The largest collection of new Middleton criticism ever assembled, this ambitious Handbook provides a comprehensive, in-depth, cutting-edge reaction to OUP's Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, winner of the 2009 MLA prize for editing, the first complete scholarly text of his voluminous and diverse oeuvre. The Handbook brings together an international, cross-generational team of experts to discuss all these genres through an equally diverse range of critical approaches, from feminism to stylistics, ecocriticism to performance studies, Aristotle to Zizek. Reinterpretations of canonical plays such as The Changeling, Women Beware Women, The Roaring Girl, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside mingle with explorations of neglected or recently-identified works. Middleton's dramatic use of dance, music, and clothing, Middletonian adaptation, his relationships to the classical world and to continental Europe, his fascinating explorations of sexuality and religion, all receive attention. The collection also provides new essays on modern and postmodern reactions to Middleton, including recent Middleton revivals and films, and living artists' responses to his work-responses that range from the actresses who play Middleton's women to writers in various genres who have been inspired by his artistry. The Handbook establishes an authoritative foundation for the rapidly-expanding growth of interest in this extraordinarily protean, funny, moving, disturbing, and modern writer.

Author: Heather Hirschfeld
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801470625
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In The End of Satisfaction, Heather Hirschfeld recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term "satisfaction" during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the term’s significance as an organizing principle of Christian repentance, she examines the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatized the consequences of its re- or de-valuation in the process of Reformation doctrinal change. The Protestant theology of repentance, Hirschfeld suggests, underwrote a variety of theatrical plots "to set things right" in a world shorn of the prospect of "making enough" (satisfacere).Hirschfeld’s semantic history traces today’s use of "satisfaction"—as an unexamined measure of inward gratification rather than a finely nuanced standard of relational exchange—to the pressures on legal, economic, and marital discourses wrought by the Protestant rejection of the Catholic sacrament of penance (contrition, confession, satisfaction) and represented imaginatively on the stage. In so doing, it offers fresh readings of the penitential economies of canonical plays including Dr. Faustus, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello; considers the doctrinal and generic importance of lesser-known plays including Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Love’s Pilgrimage; and opens new avenues into the study of literature and repentance in early modern England.

Author: Gretchen E. Minton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474257526
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A major new edition of this much studied play offering the standard, depth and range associated with all Arden editions. The on-page commentary notes explain the language, referenes and staging issues posed by the text while the lengthy, illustrated introduction offers a lively overview of the play's historical, performance and critical contexts. This is the ideal edition for study and performance.

Author: Rick Bowers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317071972
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Drawing on the generic and mythic strength of comedy and the theories of Bakhtin, Bergson, and Hobbes, this book identifies the radical nature of early modern English comedy. The satirical comedic actions that shape the "Shepherds' Play," Thomas Dekker's pamphlets, and the comic dramas of Marston, Middleton, and Jonson are all driven, Bowers points out, by an ability to criticize authority, assert plebeian culture, and insist on the complexity and innovation of human discourse. The texts examined (including The Jew of Malta, Metamorphosis of Ajax, Antonio and Mellida, Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) simultaneously create and employ standard comedic elements. Farce, absurdity, excess, over-the-top characters, unremitting irony, black humor, toilet humor, and tricksters of all types - such features and more combine to satirize medical, religious, and political authority and to implement necessary social change. Written with a narrative ease, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England shows how comic interventions both describe and reconfigure prevalent authority in its own time while arguing that, through early modern comedy, one can observe the changes in social behavior and understandings characteristic of the Renaissance.