Publicity And The Early Modern Stage

What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity’s production. The men and women associated with playing—not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions—introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.

This volume explores the multiple connections between contemporary British theatre and the medieval and early modern periods. Involving both French and British scholars, as well as playwrights, adapters and stage directors, its scope is political, as it assesses the power of adaptations and history plays to offer a new perspective not only on the past and present, but also on the future. Along the way, burning contemporary social and political issues are explored, such as the place and role of women and ethnic minorities in today’s post-Brexit Britain. The volume builds into a dialogue between the ghosts of the past and their contemporary spectators. Starting with a focus on contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, then concentrating on contemporary history plays set in the distant past, and ending with the contributions of famous playwrights sharing their experience, the book will be of interest to practitioners, as well as students and researchers in drama and performance studies.

An international team of scholars examines the theatrical world in which Shakespeare worked, tracing the social, political, and patronage pressures under which actors operated. They also explore the practicalities of playing: acquiring scripts, theatres, rehearsing, lighting, music, props, boy actors, and the role of women in an 'all-male' world.

Matthew Hunter shows how early modern plays modeled diverse styles of talk for audiences inhabiting a newly public world.

Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England's first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport arenas. In the first book-length exploration of gaming in the early modern period, Gina Bloom shows that theaters succeeded in London's new entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing a game were similar experiences. Audiences did not just see a play; they were encouraged to play the play, and knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining dramas written for these theaters alongside evidence of analog games popular then and today, Bloom argues for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology. Gaming the Stage also introduces a new archive for game studies: scenes of onstage gaming, which appear at climactic moments in dramatic literature. Bloom reveals plays to be systems of information for theater spectators: games of withholding, divulging, speculating, and wagering on knowledge. Her book breaks new ground through examinations of plays such as The Tempest, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and A Game at Chess; the histories of familiar games such as cards, backgammon, and chess; less familiar ones, like Game of the Goose; and even a mixed-reality theater videogame.

The first comprehensive history of the Elizabethan libel, this interdisciplinary account traces a viral and often virulent media ecosystem.

Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.

In a late 1590s atlas proof from cartographer John Speed, Queen Elizabeth appears, crowned and brandishing a ruler as the map's scale-of-miles. Not just a map key, the queen's depiction here presents her as a powerful arbiter of measurement in her kingdom. For Speed, the queen was a formidable female presence, authoritative, ready to measure any place or person. The atlas, finished during James' reign, later omitted her picture. But this disappearance did not mean Elizabeth vanished entirely; her image and her connection to geography appear in multiple plays and maps. Elizabeth becomes, like the ruler she holds, an instrument applied and adapted. Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage explores the ways in which mapmakers, playwrights, and audiences in early modern England could, following their queen's example, use the ideas of geography, or 'world-writing', to reshape the symbolic import of the female body and territory to create new identities. The book demonstrates how early modern mapmakers and dramatists -- men and women -- conceived of and constructed identities within a discourse of fluid ideas about space and gender.