Stage Stake And Scaffold

In Shakespeare's London, the stage of the playhouse, the stake of the bear baiting arena, and the scaffold of public execution constituted an ensemble of related spectacles that shared the same audiences. Andreas Hofele argues that this generated a powerful exchange of images and a spill-over of animal features into Shakespeare's characters.

Engaging and stimulating, this Introduction provides a fresh vista of the early modern theatrical landscape. Chapters are arranged according to key genres (tragedy, revenge, satire, history play, pastoral and city comedy), punctuated by a series of focused case studies on topics ranging from repertoire to performance style, political events to the physical body of the actor, and from plays in print to the space of the playhouse. Julie Sanders encourages readers to engage with particular dramatic moments, such as opening scenes, skulls on stage or the conventions of disguise, and to apply the materials and methods contained in the book in inventive ways. A timeline and frequent cross-references provide continuity. Always alert to the possibilities of performance, Sanders reveals the remarkable story of early modern drama not through individual writers, but through repertoires and company practices, helping to relocate and re-imagine canonical plays and playwrights.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. The theme for Shakespeare Survey 60 is 'Theatres for Shakespeare'.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international journal committee to the publication of essays and reviews relevant to drama and theatre history to 1642. This issue includes eight new articles and reviews of fourteen books.

An annual volume containing essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from around the world. Also includes two review articles and thirteen books reviews.

"What if at night at the theaters in Elizabethan England more closely resembled attending a rugby match than sitting in a dark, silent audience, passively witnessing the action on the stage, or closer to going to a rock concert than sitting in front of a large or small screen, quietly and distantly absorbing a film or television drama? In this book, West proposes a new account of what happened in the playhouses of Shakespeare's time, and the kind of participatory entertainment expected by both the actors and the audience. Combining the precision of a philologist and the imagination of a philosopher, West performs careful readings of premodern figures of speech--including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting--still in use today, but whose meanings for Elizabethan players, playgoers, and writers have diverged in subtle ways in our era. Playing itself was not restricted to the confines of the actors on the stage but pertained just as much to the audience in a collaborative rather than individualized theater experience, more corporeal, tactile, and active, rather than purely receptive and visual. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears--these and more contributed to both the verbal and physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption,all within the confines of the playhouse. West's account of the experience of the playhouse shows more affinity--and continuity--with more raucous, unruly medieval drama than previous literary critics have allowed. It will be of interest to a wide audience, actors, directors, and scholars included"

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.

Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama. This volume re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting representations of the East were communicated on stage through the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance effects. The collection emphasizes these material aspects of dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John Fletcher's The Island Princess.