Elizabethan And Jacobean Drama

The purpose of this absorbing collection is to illuminate the world of the theatre by setting it squarely in its historical context. To that end, Professor Evans draws on the whole spectrum of Elizabethan-Jacobean writing, from official documents to diaries and letters. Part I, The Theatre and the World, deals, through contemporary writings, with the drama itself, the audiences and their responses, theatrical companies, acting and actors, and buildings and technical matters. Part II, The Worlds and the Theatre, illustrates how the problems of everyday life, complicated as they were by moral, religious, social, political, and economic issues, provided an ever-fruitful source of materials to the dramatists who practiced their craft during this extraordinarily creative period.

Freer's commentary and theoretical explanations suggest both why and how we should pay closer attention to the poetry of Renaissance drama.

This study combines a consideration of the general issues affecting Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy with particular comment on plays.

Callan Davies presents “strangeness” as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama—one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as “Shakespeare’s late plays,” “tragicomedy,” or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

In this work, Janet Clare maintains that to understand dramatic and theatrical censorship in the Renaissance we need to map its terrain, not its serial changes and examine the language through which it was articulated. In tracing the development of dramatic censorship from its origins in the suppression of the medieval religious drama to the end of the Jacobean period, she shows how the system of censorship which operated under Elizabeth I and James I was dynamic, unstable and unpredictable. The author questions notions which regard censorship as either consistently repressive or as irregular and negotiable, arguing that it was governed by the contingencies of the historical moment.

This book gives a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Besides providing readings of plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, it also places Shakespeare emphatically within his own theatrical context, and focuses on the relationship between the demanding repertory system of the time and the conventions and content of the plays. Lopez argues that the limitations of the relatively bare stage and non-naturalistic mode of early modern theatre would have made the potential for failure very great, and he proposes that understanding this potential for failure is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on stage. The book offers perspectives on familiar conventions such as the pun, the aside and the expository speech; and it works toward a definition of early modern theatrical genres based on the relationship between these well-known conventions and the incoherent experience of early modern theatrical narratives.

One of the smash hits of the late 1580s and 90s, Tamburlaine established blank verse as the poetic line of English Renaissance drama, Edward Alleyn as the first English star actor and Marlowe as one of the foremost playwrights of his time. The rise and fall of a Scythian peasant-warrior who conquers the Middle East and is struck down by illness after burning the books of the Koran is presented in two parts crammed with theatrical splendour and equally spectacular cruelty. Marlowe's original audiences were delighted with the blasphemous and ruthlessly ambitious hero; the introduction to this edition discusses the problems that such a character poses for modern audiences and highlights the undercurrents of the play that lead towards a more ironic interpretation.

Works written and published in Latin by Elizabethan and Jacobean writers covered a vast range, from brief poetic trifles to massive scholarly, humanist and scientific treatises. Among its authors were some of the greatest intellects of the day; and study of Latin dedications and commendatory verses makes clear the importance of Latinate culture in the Court as well as in the universities and learned professions. English renaissance Latin culture was the shared intellectual background for all educated people, England's bridge to the scientific, literary, political, philosophical and religious life of continental Europe. J.W. Binns has examined almost all the numerous books written in Latin and printed in England during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (ICEJE)is the result of over 25 years labour - the first comprehensive overview of the Latinate culture of England, which was the counterpart, on a higher intellectual level, of the better-known contemporary achievements in the English vernacular. It discusses various aspects of the Latin poetry of Renaissance England (seven chapters); Latin drama, and its attackers and defenders; translations into Latin from Greek and from European vernaculars; treatises on such disparate subjects as translation theory, the soul, swimming, and humanist historiography and biography; writings on theology; legal studies; and the physical sciences. Treatments vary, from the close study of significant individuals (such as Case and Rainolds) to broader surveys, for example, of Latin style. Latin quoted in the main text is accompanied by English translation. The extensive reference section contains a tripartite Bibliography, of manuscripts, books printed before 1751, and books and articles printed after 1750; a Biographical Register of around 1000 entries; and an Index of Modern Authors, followed by a detailed General Index. ICEJE is a treasure-house of ideas and material for all researchers into Elizabethan and Jacobean literary culture. It is an essential handbook for students of English literature, renaissance scholars, cultural historians, latinists, librarians and bibliographers.