Laughter Pain And Wonder

This work's chief aim is to restore to readers, performers, and audiences the richness and vitality of Shakespeare's comedies. Richman explores the way in which a reader's relations to Shakespeare's literary texts differ from those of the relations between performers of Shakespeare's works and their audiences. Richman also examines the forms of humor and empathy that Shakespeare's comedies elicit.

Did Shakespeare's original audiences weep? Equally, while it seems obvious that they must have laughed at plays performed in early modern theatres, can we say anything about what their laughter sounded like, about when it occurred, and about how, culturally, it was interpreted? Related to both of these problems of audience behaviour is that of the stage representation of laughing, and weeping, both actions performed with astonishing frequency in early modern drama. Each action is associated with a complex set of non-verbal noises, gestures, and cultural overtones, and each is linked to audience behaviour through one of the axioms of Renaissance dramatic theory: that weeping and laughter on stage cause, respectively, weeping and laughter in the audience. This book is a study of laughter and weeping in English theatres, broadly defined, from around 1550 until their closure in 1642. It is concerned both with the representation of these actions on the stage, and with what can be reconstructed about the laughter and weeping of theatrical audiences themselves, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.

Described as one of Shakespeare's most intriguing plays, All's Well That Ends Well has only recently begun to receive the critical attention it deserves. Noted as a crucial point of development in Shakespeare's career, this collection of new essays reflects the growing interest in the play and presents a broad range of approaches to it, including historical, feminist, performative and psychoanalytical criticisms.In addition to fourteen essays written by leading scholars, the editor's introduction provides a substantial overview of the play's critical history, with a s.

The authoritative edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers. While the word “gentlemen” suggests that its heroes are adults, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is more intelligible if we think of them as boys, leaving home for the first time. One has a crush on a girl, Julia, though he hasn’t yet told her. Sent to court to learn to be “perfect gentlemen,” Valentine and Proteus are derailed by their attraction to Sylvia, the ruler’s daughter. Valentine’s mental denseness does not deter Sylvia from returning his love, but he is caught, and banished, when he tries to elope with her. Proteus’s desire for Sylvia wipes out his former love, leading him into despicable acts that win scorn from Sylvia and wound Julia, who has pursued him disguised as a boy. When Sylvia follows Valentine into banishment, Proteus follows Sylvia, and Julia follows Proteus, the stage is set for a disturbing ending. But the stage is also set for the “gentlemen” to take small steps toward maturity. This edition includes: -Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play -Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play -Scene-by-scene plot summaries -A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases -An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play -Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books -An annotated guide to further reading Essay by Jeffrey Masten The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.

This book explores relationships between intermedial theater, consciousness, memory, objects, subjectivity, and affect through productive engagement with the performance aesthetics, socio-cognitive theory, and critical methodology of transversal poetics alongside other leading philosophical approaches to performance. It offers the first sustained analysis of the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to the contemporary European theater of Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Thomas Ostermeier, Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro, and the Transversal Theater Company. It connects contemporary uses of objects, simulacra, and technologies in both posthumanist discourse and postdramatic theater to the transhistorically and culturally mediating power of Shakespeare as a means by which to discuss the affective impact of intermedial theater on today’s audiences.

This collection demonstrates the usefulness of approaching texts—verbal, visual and aural—through a framework of humour. Contributors offer in-depth discussions of humour in the West within a wider cultural historical context to achieve a coherent, chronological sense of how humour proceeds from antiquity to modernity. Reading humorously reveals the complexity of certain aspects of texts that other reading approaches have so far failed to reveal. Humour in the Arts explores humour as a source of cultural formation that engages with ethical, political, and religious controversies whilst acquainting readers with a wide range of humorous structures and strategies used across Western cultures.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.