Thunder At A Playhouse

critical issues of early modern performance in fresh and vital ways. --

The study establishes the nature and aims of Finnegans Wake as Menippean satire and interprets the Wake in that light. McLuhan examines Joyce's use of language, and in particular his use of ten hundred-lettered words (thunderclaps).

From the prize-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch (“A master of the novel as well as the story . . . Effortlessly engaging” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times), a sharp, affecting, masterly new novel about a close-knit theater community in Memphis and one turbulent, transformative production of King Lear. As renovations begin at the Shakespeare Theater of Memphis, life for the core members of the company seems to be falling into disarray. Their trusted director has just retired, and theater manager Thaddeus Deerforth—staring down forty and sensing a rift growing slowly between himself and his wife, Gina—dreads the arrival of an imperious, inscrutable visiting director. Claudette, struggling to make ends meet as an actor and destabilized by family troubles, is getting frequent calls from her ex-boyfriend—and also the narcissistic, lecherous television actor who has been recruited to play King Lear in their fall production. Also invited to the cast is Malcolm Ruark, a disgraced TV anchor muddling through the fallout of a scandal involving his underaged niece—and suddenly in an even more precarious situation when the same niece, now eighteen, is cast to play Cordelia. As tensions onstage and off build toward a breaking point, the bonds among the intimately drawn characters are put to extraordinary tests—and the fate of the theater itself may even be on the line. Deftly weaving together the points of view of Thaddeus, Claudette, and Malcolm, and utterly original in its incorporation of Shakespeare’s timeless drama, Playhouse is an unforgettable story of men and women, human frailty, art, and redemption—a work of inimitable imaginative prowess by one of our most renowned storytellers.

There is a human face to Shakespeare's theatrical world. It has been captured and preserved in the amber of litigious activity. Contracts for playhouses represent human aspiration: an avaricious hope for profit or an altruistic desire to provide for a family. Lawsuits have preserved the declarations of rights and the righteous indignations as well as the fictions and half-truths under which the Renaissance theater flourished. Leases and agreements preserve the intentions, honest or dishonest, of the men who wrote, performed, and bankrolled the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The period 1590-1623, the limits of the original Shakespearean enterprise, resemble nothing so much as a third of a century of the sort of squabbling, shoving, and place-seeking familiar to every modern theatrical professional.

The Revenger's Tragedy (1606), now widely attributed to Thomas Middleton, is a play that provides a dark, satirical response to other revenge tragedies such as Hamlet. With its over-the-top and highly theatrical approach to revenge, The Revenger's Tragedy has emerged as one of the most compelling examples of a drama by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries. This collection of ten newly-commissioned essays situates the play with respect to other Middleton and Shakespeare works as well as repertory, showcasing recent research about the play's engagement with issues such as religion, genre, race, language and performance.

This book explores how the humoral womb was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the Shakespearean stage by considering the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. Galenic naturalism applied the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—to delineate women as porous, polluting, and susceptible to their environment. This book draws on early modern medical texts to provocatively demonstrate how Shakespeare’s canon offers a unique agency to female characters via humoral discourse of the womb. Chapters discuss early modern medicine’s attempt to theorize and interpret the womb, specifically its role in disease, excretion, and conception, alongside passages of Shakespeare’s plays to offer a fresh reading of (geo)humoral subjectivity. The book shows how Shakespeare subversively challenges contemporary notions of female fluidity by accentuating the significance of the womb as a source of self-defiance and autonomy for female characters across his canon.