Masters And Servants In English Renaissance Drama And Culture

Drawing upon archival material as well as the drama, popular verse and pamphlets, this book reads representations of masters and servants in relation to key Renaissance preoccupations. Apprentices, journeymen, male domestic servants, maidservants and stewards, Burnett argues, were deployed in literary texts to address questions about the exercise of power, social change and the threat of economic upheaval. In this way, writers were instrumental in creating servant 'cultures', and spaces within which forms of political resistance could be realized.

Drawing upon archival material as well as drama, popular verse and pamphlets, this' book reads representations of masters and servants in relation to key Renaissance preoccupations. Apprentices, journeymen, male domestic servants, maidservants and stewards, Mark Thornton Burnett argues, were deployed in literary texts to address questions about the exercise of power, social change and the threat of economic upheaval. In this way, writers were instrumental in creating servant culture, and spaces within which forms of political resistance could be realized.

Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theatre, and performance.

This book documents the changing realities in the fields of linguistics, literature and culture in Asia, resulting from globalization, modernisation and rapid technological development. It consists of sixteen essays by academics and researchers around the world, reflecting on the interface between the global and the local, and its impact on the local and regional languages, literatures and cultures of Asia. This scenario, which exemplifies language contact in action, is captured by the book mainly to demonstrate that linguistic negotiations, appropriations and indeed changes are not one-way. As such, their implications on language use, language choice, language policy and planning, literacy and pedagogy, identity, subjectivity and culture need to be closely examined. The uniqueness of this book lies in its attempt to showcase original research in a variety of multicultural settings. Its multi- and cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers from diverse backgrounds. This book will serve as a useful reference that is both scholarly and informative for researchers as well as academics in the fields of linguistics, literature and culture.

William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership examines problems, challenges, and crises in our contemporary world through the lens of William Shakespeare’s plays, one of the best-known, most admired, and often controversial authors of the last half-millennium.

Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy considerably advances existing scholarship on the institution of service in early modern culture and as represented on the early modern stage. With its focus on the homes of the middling sorts, to whom the protagonists of domestic tragedy belong, the book expands our understanding of employer-servant relationships beyond elite and aristocratic circles, the focus of previous studies. Drawing on early modern advice literature, household guides, domestic manuals, sermons, treatises, proverbs, mothers’ legacies, funeral sermons, diaries, letters, and jest books as well as making use of the recent findings by social and cultural historians of early modern England, the book examines the consequences of disordered domesticity for the master-servant relationship. This study nuances the picture of domestic servants constructed by both early modern moralists and modern scholarship, arguing against overarching, reductive narratives. The book argues that the experience of household service as depicted in domestic tragedy, like in real life, was complex and varied and that there was no typical experience of service.

The best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference in 2008, with a focus on the performance history of Renaissance drama.

"The Renaissance saw a dramatic explosion of such force that, four hundred years later, its plays are still amongst the most frequently performed and studied we have. This anthology offers a full introduction to Renaissance theatre in its historical and political context, along with newly edited and comprehensively annotated texts of the following plays: The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd); Arden of Faversham (Anon.); Edward II (Christopher Marlowe); A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood); The Tragedy of Mariam (Elizabeth Cary); The Masque of Blackness (Ben Jonson); The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Francis Beaumont); Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (Ben Jonson); The Roaring Girl (Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker); The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley); and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (John Ford).".