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Criticism based on literary or formalist conceptions of structure or on the history of ideas, Robert Weimann contends, has removed Shakespeare from the theater, and the theater from society at large. 'It is only when Elizabethan society, theater, and language are seen as interrelated that the structure of Shakespeare's dramatic art emerges as fully functional, that is, as part of a larger, and not only literary, whole.'
Author : Samuel Frederick Johnson Publisher : University of Delaware Press Page : 316 pages File Size : 48,43 MB Release : 1989 Category : Drama ISBN : 9780874133332
Eighteen new essays by respected critics on Shakespeare and his dramatic antecedents, contemporaries, and successors, offering an up-to-date survey-history of Renaissance theater and examples of scholarly and critical methodology.
This volume presents a brief discussion about the characteristics of William Shakespeare's stages, the history of Elizabethan theaters, the physical conditions of the stage, the composition of the companies of actors, the influence of the physical nature of the stage upon the quality of the drama, and many other related topics. The plays of Shakespeare during his lifetime were performed on stages in private theaters, provincial theaters, and playhouses. His plays were acted out in the yards of bawdy inns and in the great halls of the London inns of court. Although the Globe is certainly the most well known of all the Renaissance stages associated with Shakespeare and is rightfully the primary focus of discussion, this work includes a brief introduction to some of the other Elizabethan theaters of the time in order to provide a more complete picture of the world in which Shakespeare lived and worked.
Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.
Lunney explores Marlowe's engagement with the traditions of the popular stage in the 1580s and early 1590s and offers a new approach to his major plays in terms of staging and audience response, as well as providing a new account of English drama in these important but largely neglected years.
Theatrical performance, suggest the contributors to this volume, can be an unpredictable, individual experience as well as a communal, institutional or cultural event. The essays collected here use the tools of theatre history in their investigation into the phenomenology of the performance experience, yet they are also careful to consider the social, ideological and institutional contingencies that determine the production and reception of the living spectacle. Thus contributors combine a formalist interest in the affective and aesthetic dimensions of language and spectacle with an investment in the material cultures that both produced and received Shakespeare's plays. Six of the chapters focus on early modern cultures of performance, looking specifically at such topics as the performance of rusticity; the culture of credit; contract and performance; the cultivation of Englishness; religious ritual; and mourning and memory. Building upon and interrelating with the preceding essays, the last three chapters deal with Shakespeare and performance culture in modernity. They focus on themes including literary and theatrical performance anxiety; cultural iconicity; and the performance of Shakespearean lateness. This collection strives to bring better understanding to Shakespeare's imaginative investment in the relationship between theatrical production and the emotional, intellectual and cultural effects of performance broadly defined in social terms.