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The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England is a ground-breaking study of a controversial period of English literary, cultural, and political history. In language that is both lucid and theoretically sophisticated, Jean Howard examines the social and cultural facets of early modern theatre. She looks at the ways in which some theatrical practices were deemed deceptive and unreliable, while others were lent legitimacy by the powerful. An exciting and challenging work by one of the leading writers in the field, The Stage and Social Conflict in Early Modern England is important reading for anyone interested in the period.
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.
Engendering a Nation adopts a sophisticated feminist analysis to examine the place of gender in contesting representations of nationhood in early modern England. Plays featured include: * King John * Henry VI, Part I * Henry VI, Part II * Henry, Part III * Richard III * Richard II * Henry V. It will be a must for students and scholars interested in the cultural and social implications of Shakespeare today.
King and Commoner tales were hugely popular across the late medieval and early modern periods, their cultural influence extending from Robin Hood ballads to Shakespearean national histories. This study represents the first detailed exploration of this rich and fascinating literary tradition, tracing its development across deeply politicized fifteenth-century comic tales and early modern ballads. The medieval King and Commoner tales depict an incognito king becoming lost in the forest and encountering a disgruntled commoner who complains of class oppression and poaches the king’s deer. This is an upside-down world of tricksters, violence, and politicized feasting that critiques and deconstr...
Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance responds to the growing concern to make Shakespeare Studies inclusive of prospective students, teachers, performers, and audiences who have occupied a historically marginalized position in relation to Shakespeare's poetry and plays. This timely collection includes essays by leading and emerging scholarly voices concerned to open interest and participation in Shakespeare to wider appreciation and use. The essays discuss topics ranging from ethically-informed pedagogy to discussions of public partnerships, from accessible theater for people with disabilities to the use of Shakespeare in technical and community colleges. Inclusive Shakespeares contributes to national conversations about the role of literature in the larger project of inclusion, using Shakespeare Studies as the medium to critically examine interactions between personal identity and academia at large.
Shakespeare and Tourism provides a dialogical mapping of Shakespeare studies and touristic theory through a collection of essays by scholars on a wide range of material. This volume examines how Shakespeare tourism has evolved since its inception, and how the phenomenon has been influenced and redefined by performance studies, the prevalence of the World Wide Web, developments in technology, and the globalization of Shakespearean performance. Current scholarship recognizes Shakespearean tourism as a thriving international industry, the result of centuries of efforts to attribute meanings associated with the playwright’s biography and literary prestige to sites for artistic pilgrimage and the consumption of cultural heritage. Through bringing Shakespeare and tourism studies into more explicit contact, this collection provides readers with a broad base for comparisons across time and location, and thereby encourages a thorough reconsideration of how we understand both fields.
This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of the other. In five chapters, Jennifer Holl explores the early modern culture of theatrical celebrity and its resonances in print and performance, especially in Shakespeare’s interrogations of this emerging phenomenon in sonnets and histories, before moving on to examine the ways that shifting cultures of stage, film, and digital celebrity have perpetually recreated the Shakespeare, or even the #shakespeare, with whom audiences continue to interact. Situated at an intersection of multiple critical conversations, this book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriations, early modern theater, and celebrity studies.
Jean Howard begins this five session interview by discussing her childhood on a farm in northern Maine. Howard recalls her early years as an avid reader, the innate feminism in her family, and her decision to attend Brown University as an undergraduate. Howard talks about her mentor at Brown, Barbara Lewalski, and her time as a Marshall Scholar in London. Howard explains how these years inspired her pursuit of an intellectual study of the theater, and how Lewalski inspired a trend of female mentorship in Howard's life. Howard discusses her experience as a graduate student at Yale University, her years working at Syracuse University, her fight for maternity leave at Syracuse, and how she beca...
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In a bibliography of criticism rather than Shakespeare texts or thoughts, Kujoory offers an indicative rather than exhaustive annotated list of over 900 items that she has relied on or selected as most germane for the various interpretations or critical reception of Shakespeare plays with regard to women, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, slaves, and others. The annotations are primarily descriptive, but some include short excerpts. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR