Shortlisted for the 2017 Theatre Book PrizeWhat is it about theatre, compared to other kinds of cultural representation, which provokes such a powerful reaction?
First published in 1986, this title examines a set of English Renaissance texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, Herbert, Marvell and Milton, within the theoretic framework of postmodern thought.
Performing Shakespeare Unrehearsed: A Practical Guide to Acting and Producing Spontaneous Shakespeare outlines how Shakespeare's plays can be performed effectively without rehearsal, if all the actors understand a set of performance guidelines and put them into practice.
In Shakespeare on Theatre, master acting teacher Robert Cohen brilliantly scrutinises Shakespeare's implicit theories of acting, paying close attention to the plays themselves and providing a wealth of fascinating historical evidence.
This is the inside story of the Royal Shakespeare Company - a running historical critique of a major national institution and its location within British culture, as related by a writer who is uniquely placed to tell the tale.
'Your whole life depends on the next beat of Henry's heart'Ahead of the release of The Mirror & the Light, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy, revisit two of the most celebrated novels of our time.
From William Langland's Piers Plowman, through the highly polemicized literary culture of fifteenth-century Lollardy, to major Reformation writers such as Simon Fish, William Tyndale and John Bale, and into the 1590s, this book argues for a vital reassessment of our understanding of the literary and cultural modes of the Reformation.
By examining how female characters speak and act during coming of age, engagement, marriage, and intimacy, Consent in Shakespeare will enhance understanding about how and why women spoke, remained silent, or acted as they did in relation to their intimate partners in Early Modern and contemporary private and public situations in and around the Mediterranean.
This volume explores the relationship between the emphasis on performance in Elizabethan humanist education and the flourishing of literary brilliance around the turn of the sixteenth century.
This volume presents a fresh look at the military spouses in Shakespeare's Othello, 1 Henry IV, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, and Coriolanus, vital to understanding the plays themselves.
Shakespeare, the Renaissance and Empire presents Shakespeare as both a local and global writer, investigating Shakespeare's trans-cultural writing through the interrelations and interactions of binaries including theory and practice, past and present, aesthetics and ethics, freedom and tyranny, republic and empire, empires and colonies, poetry and history, rhetoric and poetics, England and America, and England and Asia.
Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays.
Shakespeare and Indian Nationalism aims to articulate the reception of Shakespeare by the 19th-century Indian intelligentsia from Bengal and their ambivalent approach to the Indian Renaissance and consequent nationalist project.
In this book, McMahon considers Early Modern revenge plays from a political science perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of family and state institutions.
Writers of the English Renaissance, like their European contemporaries, frequently reflect on the phenomenon of exile-an experience that forces the individual to establish a new personal identity in an alien environment.
Even for scholars who have devoted their careers to the early modern theatre, the name John Lowin may not instantly evoke recognition-until now, the actor's life and contribution to the theatre of the period has never been the subject of a full-length publication.
Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity's cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540-1690.
From William Langland's Piers Plowman, through the highly polemicized literary culture of fifteenth-century Lollardy, to major Reformation writers such as Simon Fish, William Tyndale and John Bale, and into the 1590s, this book argues for a vital reassessment of our understanding of the literary and cultural modes of the Reformation.
Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience.
Drawing upon recent scholarship in Renaissance studies regarding notions of the body, political, physical and social, this study examines how the satiric tragedians of the English Renaissance employ the languages of sex - including sexual slander, titillation, insinuation and obscenity - in the service of satiric aggression.
David Bevington's volume on George Peele looks at the literary achievement of that dramatist and author, who was born in London some time around 1556-8, was educated at Oxford, and returned to London to become a prolific writer until his death in 1596.
This book explores a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent cognitive agent, with desires, appetites, and understandings independent of the mind.
Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity is the first full-length critical study to analyse the importance of beards in terms of the theatrical performance of masculinity.
In Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain, Ros King argues that because of previous misunderstanding of the nature and history of tragi-comedy, critics have mistaken the tone of Shakespeare's play.
This book looks at Shakespeare through performance, capturing the dialogue between performance, Shakespeare, and contemporary concerns in the humanities.
With a panoramic sweep across continents and topics, Early Modern Improvisations is an interdisciplinary collection that analyzes the relationship between early modern literature and history through lenses such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and politics.
This book recovers a sense of the high stakes of Shakespearean comedy, arguing that the comedies, no less than the tragedies, serve to dramatize responses to the condition of being human, responses that invite scholarly investigation and explanation.
Should we assume that people who lived some time ago were quite similar to us or should we assume that they need to be thought of as alien beings with whom we have little in common?
