[PDF] The Contemporary History Play eBook

Author : Benjamin Poore
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 37,43 MB
Release : 2024-05-30
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 135016965X

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Something exciting is happening with the contemporary history play. New writing by playwrights such as Jackie Sibblies Drury, Samuel Adamson, Hannah Khalil, Cordelia Lynn, and Lucy Kirkwood, makes powerful theatrical use of the past, but does not fit into critics' familiar categories of historical drama. In this book, Benjamin Poore provides readers with tools to name and critically analyse these changes. The Contemporary History Play contends that many history plays are becoming more complex and layered in their aesthetic approaches, as playwrights work through the experience of being surrounded by numerous and varied forms of historical representation in the twenty-first century. For theatre scholars, this book offers a means of interpreting how new writing relies on the past and notions of historicity to generate meaning and resonance in the present. For playwrights and students of playwriting, the book is a guide to the history play's recent past, and to the state of the art: what techniques and formulas have been popular, the tropes that are widely used, and how artists have found ways of renewing or overturning established conventions.

Author : Benjamin Poore
Publisher : Methuen Drama
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 10,93 MB
Release : 2024-06-27
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1350169633

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Benjamin Poore argues that contemporary British playwriting that invokes history can be positioned on a spectrum that ranges from recovering untold stories, which offer an additional narrative to dominant understandings of history, to challenging the very foundations of historical knowledge itself. The Contemporary History Play asks what happens when a new mode of interpretation is applied to contemporary history plays and tracks the evolving uses of history in 21st-century playwriting across the UK. In the middle of this range sits a more experimental type of theatre - the liquid or porous postmodern history play - which experiments with form; de-emphasises narrative; collapses spaces and time; problematises traditional characterisation and heritage; debunks the notion of history as teaching lessons; and ultimately offers a counter narrative to history. Featuring a detailed consideration of 30 plays and productions, from Moira Buffini's Silence (1999) to Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's Emilia (2019), the book interrogates the work of playwrights such as Zinnie Harris, Moira Buffini, Rona Munro, Rory Mullarkey, DC Moore and Ella Hickson. It draws on original interviews and archival material held by organisations such as the V&A, Shakespeare's Globe, the Almeida, the RSC and the National Theatre and identifies a tradition of new writing over the past twenty years that has not been accounted for previously.

Author : Rebecca Benzie
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 38,40 MB
Release : 2024-08-22
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1350191280

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When we think of the contemporary British history play, why might we automatically think of playwrights such as David Hare, Howard Brenton, Peter Gill and Edward Bond? Because for decades the writing of the history play has been the preserve of the white male. This book provides a vital feminist intervention into the dramaturgy of history plays, investigating work produced at major British theatres from 2000 to the present, written by a generation of innovative women playwrights. This much-needed study explores the use of history – specifically Elizabethan, Restoration, Victorian and early 20th century – in contemporary playwriting in order to interrogate the gender politics of this work. Within the framework of contemporary feminism – including the pivotal #MeToo movement – the book looks at post-2000s feminist drama that somehow represents the past. Through delving into the recurring tropes and their politics in the light of current feminist debate, the author helps us grasp how these plays essentially re-imagine gender politics. Plays that are considered include Emilia (Morgan Lloyd Malcolm), Swive [Elizabeth] (Ella Hickson), An August Bank Holiday Lark (Deborah McAndrew), The Empress (Tanika Gupta), Red Velvet (Lolita Chakrabarti), Scuttlers (Rona Munro), I, Joan (Charlie Josephine), Blue Stockings and Nell Gwynn (Jessica Swale), and the musical Six (Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss).

Author : Niloufer Harben
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 47,30 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780389207344

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The book offers the clearest definition yet of the history play, its scope and its limits. Historical drama is an extremely popular genre among 20th-century English playwrights. Yet the sheer size and complexity of the subject has, until now, prevented critics from attempting a clear definition. Dr. Harben provides a new and original perspective, taking into account modern ideas of and attitudes to history. The author examines the varying approaches to history taken by modern historians and playwrights, and provides a detailed analysis of the historical source material of selected plays. The study is supported with a wealth of vivid and provocative illustrations. Historical and dramatic criticism is related to theatrical interpretation and experience. This book therefore should prove valuable and interesting to the reader with a specialist interest in the field as well as to the more general reader.

Author : Michael Hattaway
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 12,16 MB
Release : 2002-12-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521775397

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Publisher Description (unedited publisher data) Shakespeare's history plays have been performed more in recent years than ever before, in Britain, North America, and in Europe. This volume provides an accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's history and Roman plays. It is attentive throughout to the plays as they have been performed over the centuries since they were written. The first part offers accounts of the genre of the history play, of Renaissance historiography, of pageants and masques, and of women's roles, as well as comparisons with history plays in Spain and the Netherlands. Chapters in the second part look at individual plays as well as other Shakespearean texts which are closely related to the histories. The Companion offers a full bibliography, genealogical tables, and a list of principal and recurrent characters. It is a comprehensive guide for students, researchers and theatre-goers alike.

Author : Ivan Jablonka
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 47,56 MB
Release : 2018-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1501710761

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Ivan Jablonka’s History Is a Contemporary Literature offers highly innovative perspectives on the writing of history, the relationship between literature and the social sciences, and the way that both social-scientific inquiry and literary explorations contribute to our understanding of the world. Jablonka argues that the act and art of writing, far from being an afterthought in the social sciences, should play a vital role in the production of knowledge in all stages of the researcher’s work and embody or even constitute the understanding obtained. History (along with sociology and anthropology) can, he contends, achieve both greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary experience through a broad spectrum of narrative modes. Challenging scholars to adopt investigative, testimonial, and other experimental writing techniques as a way of creating and sharing knowledge, Jablonka envisions a social science literature that will inspire readers to become actively engaged in understanding their own pasts and to relate their histories to the present day. Lamenting the specialization that has isolated the academy from the rest of society, History Is a Contemporary Literature aims to bring imagination and audacity into the practice of scholarship, drawing on the techniques of literature to strengthen the methods of the social sciences.

Author : Joe L. Frost
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 566 pages
File Size : 42,14 MB
Release : 2010-04-02
Category : Education
ISBN : 1135251665

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Children’s play throughout history has been free, spontaneous, and intertwined with work, set in the playgrounds of the fields, streams, and barnyards. Children in cities enjoyed similar forms of play but their playgrounds were the vacant lands and parks. Today, children have become increasingly inactive, abandoning traditional outdoor play for sedentary, indoor cyber play and poor diets. The consequences of play deprivation, the elimination and diminution of recess, and the abandonment of outdoor play are fundamental issues in a growing crisis that threatens the health, development, and welfare of children. This valuable book traces the history of children’s play and play environments from their roots in ancient Greece and Rome to the present time in the high stakes testing environment. Through this exploration, scholar Dr. Joe Frost shows how this history informs where we are today and why we need to re-establish play as a priority. Ultimately, the author proposes active solutions to play deprivation. This book is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students in the fields of early childhood education and child development.

Author : Isabel Karremann
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 47,23 MB
Release : 2015-10-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1107117585

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This book sheds new light on the dramatic devices Shakespeare developed for turning history into theatre in his history plays.

Author : Ronda Arab
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 32,30 MB
Release : 2015-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317690702

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This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.