The Renaissance Theatre Texts Performance Design

Originally published in 1999, this book is a critical analysis of Renaissance theatre, including chapters on speaking theatres, performing theatre and redesigning Shakespeare.

Originally published in 1999, this book is a critical analysis of Renaissance theatre, including chapters on speaking theatres, performing theatre and redesigning Shakespeare.

First published in 1999, this volume examines iconography, nature, gardens, staging, tradition and innovation in the Renaissance theatre, continuing the growing interest in relationships between image and performance as a fertile field for theatre research. Papers explored areas including The Tempest, Elizabeth Cary, Antonia Pulci and Shakespeare's Italian nature.

This volume along with a previous one (on The English and Italian Theatre) include many of the papers given at a conference held at the Globe Theatre in August 1997. The essays examine a range of themes related to Renaissance dramatic production, including costume and stage design, the representation of theatrical figures in texts and illustrations, as well as on the stage; what dramatic texts may reveal about their staging, and comparisons and contrasts between English and continental traditions.

This two-volume set (of The English and Italian Theatre and Design, Image and Acting) includes many of the papers given at a conference held at the Globe Theatre in August 1997. The essays examine a range of themes related to Renaissance dramatic production, including costume and stage design, the representation of theatrical figures in texts and illustrations, as well as on the stage; what dramatic texts may reveal about their staging, and comparisons and contrasts between English and continental traditions.

This volume and a second (on Design, Image and Acting) include many of the papers given at a conference held at the Globe Theatre in August 1997. The essays examine a range of themes related to Renaissance dramatic production, including costume and stage design, the representation of theatrical figures in texts and illustrations, as well as on the stage; what dramatic texts may reveal about their staging, and comparisons and contrasts between English and continental traditions.

For the Middle Ages and Renaissance, meaning and power were created and propagated through public performance. Processions, coronations, speeches, trials, and executions are all types of public performance that were both acts and texts: acts that originated in the texts that gave them their ideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a trace of their actual performance. Literature, as well, was for the pre-modern public a type of performance: throughout the medieval and early modern periods we see a constant tension and negotiation between the oral/aural delivery of the literary work and the eventual silent/read reception of its written text. The current volume of essays examines the plurality of forms and meanings given to performance in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through discussion of the essential performance/text relationship. The authors of the essays represent a variety of scholarly disciplines and subject matter: from the "performed" life of the Dominican preacher, to coronation processions, to book presentations; from satirical music speeches, to the rendering of widow portraits, to the performance of romance and pious narrative. Diverse in their objects of study, the essays in this volume all examine the links between the actual events of public performance and the textual origins and subsequent representation of those performances.