Stuart Academic Drama

Although not much is known about the three Stuart plays in this edition, which was first published in 1987, we can ascribe them to one of the English universities, and each is indicative of a distinctly different influence on the Renaissance academic drama. Heteroclitanomalonomia is part of a minor subgenre referred to as the academic play. It demonstrates the predominance of language or rhetoric studies in the period and its very subject is of purely academic interest. Gigantomachia displays the continuing interest of the Renaissance in classical mythology. And A Christmas Messe follows a more homely tradition, a farcical personification of the mundane. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

Publisher description

Twenty-two leading experts on early modern drama collaborate in this volume to explore three closely interconnected research questions. To what extent did playwrights represent dramatis personae in their entertainments as forming, or failing to form, communal groupings? How far were theatrical productions likely to weld, or separate, different communal groupings within their target audiences? And how might such bondings or oppositions among spectators have tallied with the community-making or -breaking on stage? Chapters in Part One respond to one or more of these questions by reassessing general period trends in censorship, theatre attendance, forms of patronage, playwrights’ professional and linguistic networks, their use of music, and their handling of ethical controversies. In Part Two, responses arise from detailed re-examinations of particular plays by Shakespeare, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Cary, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Both Parts cover a full range of early-Stuart theatre settings, from the public and popular to the more private circumstances of hall playhouses, court masques, women’s drama, country-house theatricals, and school plays. And one overall finding is that, although playwrights frequently staged or alluded to communal conflict, they seldom exacerbated such divisiveness within their audience. Rather, they tended toward more tactful modes of address (sometimes even acknowledging their own ideological uncertainties) so that, at least for the duration of a play, their audiences could be a community within which internal rifts were openly brought into dialogue.

Shakespeare produced most of his great tragedies during the politically disturbed and plague-filled decade following the accession of James I, a period of formidable difficulties for the London theater. Focusing not upon Shakespeare's personal biography but upon his professional role as a member of the company of the King's Servants, Leeds Barroll offers a new narrative about the dramatist's relationship to the court of King James, as well as the manner and order in which the Stuart plays were composed. Positioned in terms of contemporary critical and historical theory, rich in historical details, and challenging in its implications, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theatre will be read with interest by scholars and students of Elizabethan drama, theater history, Renaissance studies, and English history.

Literary and cultural changes reflecting new commercial and imperial interests of Restoration Britain.

Dramatic performances at the universities in early modern England have usually been regarded as insular events, completely removed from the plays of the London stage. Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England challenges that long-held notion, illuminating how an apparently secluded theatrical culture became a major source of inspiration for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While many university plays featured classical themes, others reflected upon the academic environments in which they were produced, allowing a window into the universities themselves. This window proved especially fruitful for Shakespeare, who, as this book reveals, had a sustained fascination with the universities and their inhabitants. Daniel Blank provides groundbreaking new readings of plays from throughout Shakespeare's career, illustrating how depictions of academic culture in Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, and Macbeth were shaped by university plays. Shakespeare was not unique, however. This book also discusses the impact of university drama on professional plays by Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Ben Jonson, all of whom in various ways facilitated the connection between the university stage and the London commercial stage. Yet this connection, perhaps counterintuitively, is most significant in the works of a playwright who had no formal attachment to Oxford or Cambridge. Shakespeare, this study shows, was at the center of a rich exchange between two seemingly disparate theatrical worlds.

Published in 1987: This edition seeks to make available, for the scholar and the student of Elizabethan literature, an accurate text of an Heptameron of Civill Discourses.

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). The book engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory and cultural critique and examines their influence on a generation of seminal post-war dramatists.