Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Volpone's Bastards PDF full book. Access full book title Volpone's Bastards by Isaac Hui. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Isaac Hui Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474423485 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
Through studying Volpone's three bastard children, this book discusses how Jonson's comedies are built upon the tension between death, castration and nothingness on one hand, and the comic slippage of identities in the city on the other.
Author: Isaac Hui Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474423485 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
Through studying Volpone's three bastard children, this book discusses how Jonson's comedies are built upon the tension between death, castration and nothingness on one hand, and the comic slippage of identities in the city on the other.
Author: Ben Jonson Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 9780719030932 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
This is the most thoroughly investigated edition of Volpone to date, based on a wider collation of the 1607 quarto and 1616 folio versions than was previously possible. It calls into question several accepted textual conclusions. The introduction sets Volpone in the context of Jonson’s career at the time of writing and introduces new material on its relation to the Reynard beast epic and the commedia dell’ arte. Ambiguities in the play are discussed with reference to two Renaissance perversions of the myth of the Golden Age. Particular attention is paid to the rhythmic effects of the play in performance, especially interweavings of the main plot and subplot. Fresh suggestions are made about the play’s opening and its controversial conclusion in the light of experiments that have been made in performance since Volpone ’s stage revival in 1921. The modernized text is accompanied by full commentary, notes and illustrations. The appendices include a discussion by John Cutts of the original music, passages translated from the original sources and analogues, and a full record of the play’s modern stage history, its many adaptations, and its transformations into opera, musical comedy, film and television.
Author: Marshall Botvinick Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443887625 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 115
Book Description
Ben Jonson has frequently been maligned for his antitheatricalism and inability to conceive of his plays as anything other than a reading experience. Staging Ben: A Collection of Essays on the Theatricality of Jonson’s Plays offers a rebuttal of this mischaracterization of Jonson’s work. Featuring contributions from both Renaissance literature scholars and theatre practitioners, this volume of essays demonstrates the prodigious theatrical imagination of one of the world’s most underappreciated dramatists. It explores the problems associated with producing a Jonson play – from length to topicality to cast size – and offers solutions for those who have an interest in bringing Jonson’s plays to life. Specific plays explored in this collection are Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, Catiline, and Bartholomew Fair.
Author: Alison Findlay Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 9780719039911 Category : Authority in literature Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
In Renaissance drama, the bastard is an extraordinarily powerful and disruptive figure. We have only to think of Caliban or of Edmund to realise the challenge presented by the illegitimate child. Drawing on a wide range of play texts, Alison Findlay shows how illegitimacy encoded and threatened to deconstruct some of the basic tenets of patriarchal rule. She considers bastards as indicators and instigators of crisis in early modern England, reading them in relation to witchcraft, spiritual insecurities and social unrest in family and State. The characters discussed range from demi-devils, unnatural villains and clowns to outstandingly heroic or virtuous types who challenge officially sanctioned ideas of illegitimacy. The final chapter of the book considers bastards in performance; their relationship with theatre spaces and audiences. Illegitimate voices, Findlay argues, can bring about the death of the author/father and open the text as a piece of theatre, challenging accepted notions of authority.
Author: Sean McEvoy Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748629912 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
This new guide to the English renaissance's most erudite and yet most street-wise dramatist strongly asserts the theatrical brilliance of his greatest plays in performance, then and now.The book integrates all of Jonson's major plays into the milieu of the turbulent years which produced them, and analyses the way each work examines the issues and challenges of those years: money, power, sex, crime, identity, gender, the theatre itself. It offers a lucid guide to the competing critical views of a playwright who is far more than the obverse of his friend and rival William Shakespeare, and it explains in detail how the undoubted power and energy of these plays in modern performance should be the touchstone of their quality to both critic and reader. The plays discussed include the early Comedies, the Roman Tragedies (Sejanus and Catiline), Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass.
Author: R. Huebert Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230503160 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
Offering new and theatrically informed readings of plays by a broad range of Renaissance dramatists - including Marlowe, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Middleton and Ford - this new book addresses the question of pleasure: both erotic pleasure as represented on stage and aesthetic pleasure as experienced by readers and spectators. Some of the issues raised (the distribution of pleasure by gender, the notion of consent) intersect with feminist reinterpretations of Renaissance culture.
Author: Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192654802 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 721
Book Description
Premodern critical race studies, long intertwined with Shakespeare studies, has broadened our understanding of the definitions and discourse of race and racism to include not only phenotype, but also religious and political identity, regional, national, and linguistic difference, and systems of differentiation based upon culture and custom. Replete with fresh readings of the plays and poems, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race brings together some of the most important scholars thinking about the subject today. The volume offers a thorough overview of the most significant theoretical and methodological paradigms such as critical race theory, feminist, and postcolonial studies; a dynamic look at intersections of race with queer, trans, disability, and indigenous studies; and a vibrant array of new approaches from ecocriticism, to animality, and human rights, from book history, to scholarly editing, and repertory studies; and an exploration of Shakespeare and race in our contemporary moment through discussions of political activism, pedagogy, visual arts, film, and theatre. Woven through the collection are the voices of practicing theatre professionals who have grappled with the challenges of race and racism both in performance and in the profession itself.
Author: Anne Enderwitz Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192692224 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
This book provides new insights into how theatre responded to changing economic practices and structures. It reviews discourses on household management and commerce to create a rich context for the discussion of socio-economic actions and transactions in Macbeth, Othello, and Timon of Athens, as well as in city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. By approaching discourses on economy and commerce as complementary, the book opens up a diverse field of socio-economic practices, including the gendered division of duties in the household, new modes of valuation, and evolving credit instruments. Theatre provides unique access to this field. In contrast to practical and policy-oriented discourses, it addresses socio-economic change and its vicissitudes in a spirit of experimentation, testing the ethical limits of socio-economic action and accustoming audiences to the demands of a changing socio-economic reality. Theatre thus offers a vital contribution to the prehistory of political economy. On the London stages, self-interest emerges as a key motive of socio-economic action, and theatre playfully explores its ambiguous status as a partly rational and partly excessive force that has a new ordering function but also creates social conflict. At the same time, by staging the contradictory demands of ethics and efficiency in economic decision-making, early modern plays offer access to a changing understanding of prudence that has a Machiavellian touch: by aligning with the pursuit of private interest, prudence sheds some of its ethical content and becomes foremost an instrumental faculty.
Author: Maggie Vinter Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 082328428X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
Last Acts argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Psychoanalytic and new historicist scholars have exhaustively documented the methods that early modern dramatic texts and performances use to memorialize the dead, at times even asserting that theater itself constitutes a form of mourning. But early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grief than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie narratives of helplessness and loss through which mortality is too often read and instead suggest how marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some early modern strategies for dying resonate with descriptions of politicized biological life in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, or with ecclesiastical forms. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, alongside devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.