Vince has provided a useful and, for the most part, usable reference work. His introduction should be required reading for anyone approaching medieval theater. "Choice"

Scholars increasingly see medieval theatre as a complex and vital performance medium related more closely to political, religious, and social life than to literature as we know it. Reflecting the current interest in performance, "A Companion to the Medieval Theatre" presents 250 alphabetically arranged entries offering a panoramic view of European and British theatrical productions between the years 900 and 1550. The volume features 30 essays contributed by an international group of specialists and includes many shorter entries as well as systematic cross-referencing, a chronology, a bibliography, and a full complement of indexes.

Major entries focus on the theatres of the principal linguistic areas (the British Isles, France, Germany, Iberia, Italy, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and Eastern Europe), and on dramatic forms and genres such as liturgical drama, Passion and saint plays, morality plays, folk drama, and Humanist drama. Other articles examine costume, acting, pageantry, and music, and explore the theatrical dimension of courtly entertainment, the dance, and the tournament. Short entries supply information on over one hundred playwrights, directors, actors and antiquarians whose contributions to the theatre have been documented. This informative guide brings new depth to our appreciation of the richness and color of medieval public entertainments and the symbolism and pageantry that were a part of daily life in the Middle Ages. Designed to appeal to general reader, this volume is also an attractive choice for libraries serving students and scholars of theatre history, English and European literatures, medieval history, cultural history, drama, and performance.

Documentary theatre is a form of theatre created from the verbatim use of interviews, photographs and historical proceedings. This book brings together essays, interviews and performance texts, many published here for the first time, which describe and analyse documentary theatre around the world: both its history and its proliferation since 9/11.

Theatre of Real People offers fresh perspectives on the current fascination with putting people on stage who present aspects of their own lives and who are not usually trained actors. After providing a history of this mode of performance, and theoretical frameworks for its analysis, the book focuses on work developed by seminal practitioners at Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) production house. It invites the reader to explore the HAU's innovative approach to Theatre of Real People, authenticity and cultural diversity during the period of Matthias Lilienthal's leadership (2003-12). Garde and Mumford also elucidate how Theatre of Real People can create and destabilise a sense of the authentic, and suggest how Authenticity-Effects can present new ways of perceiving diverse and unfamiliar people. Through a detailed analysis of key HAU productions such as Lilienthal's brainchild X-Apartments, Mobile Academy's Blackmarket, and Rimini Protokoll's 100% City, the book explores both the artistic agenda of an important European theatre institution, and a crucial aspect of contemporary theatre's social engagement.

Exploring the performance of masculinity on and off the nineteenth-century American stage, this book looks at the shift from the passionate muscularity to intellectual restraint as not a linear journey toward national refinement; but a multitude of masculinities fighting simultaneously for dominance and recognition.

The Theatre of War surveys more than two hundred plays about the First World War written, published and/or performed in Britain and Ireland between 1909 and 1998. Collectively, these plays constitute an important aspect of British and Irish literary, social and cultural history. They are discussed from five major perspectives: subject matter, technique, attitude, reception and evaluation. The resulting complex image is a significant contribution to the understanding of the First World War as a watershed in international history.

Music-Dance explores the identity of choreomusical work, its complex authorship and its modes of reception as well as the cognitive processes involved in the reception of dance performance. Scholars of dance and music analyse the ways in which a musical score changes its prescriptive status when it becomes part of a choreographic project, the encounter between sound and motion on stage, and the intersection of listening and seeing. As well as being of interest to musicologists and choreologists considering issues such as notation, multimedia and the analysis of performance, this volume will appeal to scholars interested in applied research in the fields of cognition and neuroscience. The line-up of authors comprises representative figures of today's choreomusicology, dance historians, scholars of twentieth-century composition and specialists in cognitive science and performance studies. Among the topics covered are multimedia and the analysis of performance; the notational practice of choreographers and the parallel attempts of composers to find a graphic representation for musical gestures; and the experience of dance as a paradigm for a multimodal perception, which is investigated in terms of how the association of sound and movement triggers emotions and specific forms of cognition.

Using examples of refugee arts and theatrical activity since the 1990s, this book examines how the 'refugee crisis' has conditioned all arts and cultural activity with refugees in a world where globalization and migration go hand in hand.

'Meticulously researched and lucidly written, this volume will likely become and remain the definitive study of the history of works Hardy adapted for the stage and of the Hardy Players who, in the main, performed them.' - John J. Conlon, English Literature in Transition;'Much new research informs this first full-length study of Hardy's involvement in stage productions based on his own works. The result is a closely reasoned account of the conflict between his desire to see his plots and characters brought to the stage, and his awareness of the attending difficulties.' - M.S. Vogeler, Choice;Despite Hardy's lifelong interest in the theatre, this is the first comprehensive study of all aspects of his involvement with the stage, the only area of his literary activities left substantially unexplored. It discusses his own experiments at crafting scenarios and plays, all productions, both amateur and professional, with which he had any involvement, and his troubled negotiations with adapters, producers, and actors. It is fascinating for what it reveals about both the artist and the man, and offers particular insight into the paradoxical connections between the retiring Dorchester celebr

In an innovative and wide-ranging collection of essays, The Performing Century looks at modes of performance and forms of theatre in Nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. From the vogue for fairy plays to the acting styles of melodrama, from the work of a single impresario to the nature of a genre, from ship-launches in Belfast to royal weddings in England, from the representation of economics to the work of a parliamentary committee in regulating theatres, the authors bring new perspectives on familiar material and radically redefine what theatre and performance in the Nineteenth century might be.

This new study of one of Britain's greatest modern playwrights represents the first major, extended discussion of Edward Bond's work in over twenty years. The book combines rigorous and readable analysis and discussion of Bond's plays and ideas about drama and society. For the first time, there is also discussion of selected plays from his later, post-2000 period, including "Innocence" and "There Will Be More," alongside explorations of widely studied plays such as "Saved."

This book examines queer performance in Britain since the early 1990s, arguing for the significance of emerging collaborative modes of practice. Using queer theory and the history of early lesbian and gay theatre to examine claims to representation among other things, it interrogates the relationships through which recent works have been presented.

What have we learned from the first experiments performed at the reconstructed Globe on Bankside? What light have recent productions shed on the way Shakespeare intended his plays to be seen? Written by the Leverhulme Fellow appointed to study and record actor use of this new-old playhouse, here is the first analytical account of the discoveries that have been made in its important first years, in workshops, rehearsals and performances. It shows how actors, directors and playgoers have responded to the demands of 'historical' constraints (and unexpected freedoms) to provide valuable new insights into the dynamics of Elizabethan theatre.

Sixteenth-century Italy witnessed the rebirth of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in the pastoral mode. Traditionally, we think of comedy and tragedy as remakes of ancient models, and tragicomedy alone as the invention of the moderns. Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy suggests that all three genres were, in fact, remarkably new, if dramatists' intriguingly sympathetic portrayals of and sustained investment in women as vibrant and dynamic characters of the early modern stage are taken into account. This study examines the role of rhetoric and gender in early modern Italian drama, in itself and in order to explore its complex interrelationship with the rise of women writers and the role women played in Italian culture and society, while at the same time demonstrating just how closely intertwined history, culture, and dramatic writing are. Author Alexandra Coller focuses on the scripted/erudite plays of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, which, she argues, are indispensable for a balanced view of the history of drama and its place within contemporary literary and women's studies. As this book reveals, the ascendancy of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy in the vernacular seems to have been not only inextricably linked to but also dependent on the rise of women as prominent stage characters and, eventually, as authors in their own right.

Transatlantic Broadway traces the infrastructural networks and technological advances that supported the globalization of popular entertainment in the pre-World War I period, with a specific focus on the production and performance of Broadway as physical space, dream factory, and glorious machine.

After Robert Armin joined the Chamberlain's Men, singing in Shakespeare's dramas catapulted from 1.25 songs and 9.95 lines of singing per play to 3.44 songs and 29.75 lines of singing, a virtually unnoticed phenomenon. In addition, many of the songs became seemingly improvisatory-similar to Armin's personal style as an author and solo comedian. In order to study Armin's collaborative impact, this interdisciplinary book investigates the songs that have Renaissance music that could have been heard on Shakespeare's stage. They occur in some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and The Tempest. In fact, Shakespeare's plays, as we have them, are not complete. They are missing the music that could have accompanied the plays' songs. Significantly, Renaissance vocal music, far beyond just providing entertainment, was believed to alter the bodies and souls of both performers and auditors to agree with its characteristics, directly inciting passions from love to melancholy. By collaborating with early modern music editor and performing artist Lawrence Lipnik, Catherine Henze is able to provide new performance editions of seventeen songs, including spoken interruptions and cuts and rearrangement of the music to accommodate the dramatist's words. Next, Henze analyzes the complete songs, words and music, according to Renaissance literary and music primary sources, and applies the new information to interpretations of characters and scenes, frequently challenging commonly held literary assessments. The book is organized according to Armin's involvement with the plays, before, during, and after the comic actor joined Shakespeare's company. It offers readers the tools to interpret not only these songs, but also vocal music in dramas by other Renaissance playwrights. Moreover, Robert Armin and Shakespeare's Performed Songs, written with non-specialized terminology, provides a gateway to new areas of research and interpretation in an increasingly significant interdisciplinary field for all interested in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance studies interrelationships between English and Italian Theatre of the Renaissance period, including texts, performance and performance spaces, and cultural parallels and contrasts. Connections are traced between Italian writers including Aretino, Castiglione and Zorenzo Valla and such English playwrights as Shakespeare, Lyly and Ben Jonson. The impact of Italian popular tradition on Shakespeare's comedies is analysed, together with Jonson's theatrical recreation of Venice, and Italian sources for the court masques of Jonson, Daniel and Campion.

'Anthony Munday and civic culture' is a full-scale study of a fascinating but hitherto neglected author set in the context of the city where he was born, and where he lived and worked. A re-appraisal of Munday has long been overdue. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Dekker, amongst others; as a playwright, prose writer, translator, poet, pageant-maker and pamphleteer he was active in all the major literary genres of his day. This study of his diverse works throws fresh light on our understanding of this significant period, which thus far has largely been interpreted through canonical texts and authors. Recent early modern studies have been characterised by a return to history and an increasing interest in the material dimensions of culture. This book also builds in a timely fashion upon the on-going scholarly interest in London and its culture to put forward new ways of re-thinking existing debates, such as the relationship between the City of London, the court and the theatres. A wide range of Munday's texts are explored in depth, including plays, original prose works, translations, Lord Mayors' Shows, and his editions of John Stow's Survey of London. The book employs an interdisciplinary methodology drawing on history, biography, literary criticism and topography, offering a broad and contextualised account of this important writer in his various milieux. 'Anthony Munday and civic culture' explores historical sources as well as literary texts and will appeal to students and scholars of both early modern literature and history as well as to cultural geographers.

Across a series of twelve in-depth interviews with a diverse range of major artists, Dominic Johnson presents a new oral history of performance art. From uses of body modification and physical extremity, to the creation of all-encompassing personae, to performance pieces lasting months or years, these artists have provoked and explored the vital limits between art and life. Their discussions with Johnson give us a glimpse of their artistic motivations, preoccupations, processes, and contexts. Despite the diversity of art forms and experiences featured, common threads weave between the interviews: love, friendship, commitment, death and survival. Each interview is preceded by an overview of the artist's work, and the volume itself is introduced by a thoughtful critical essay on performance art and oral history. The conversational tone of the interviews renders complex ideas and theoretical propositions accessible, making this an ideal book for students of Theatre and Performance, as well as for artists, scholars and general readers.

The performing arts are uniquely capable of translating a vision of an ideal or sacred reality into lived practice, allowing an audience to confront deeply held values and beliefs as they observe a performance. However, there is often a reluctance to approach distinctly religious topics from a performance studies perspective. This book addresses this issue by exploring how religious values are acted out and reflected on in classic Western theatre, with a particular emphasis on the plays put on during the Globe Theatre's yearlong season of 'Shakespeare and the Bible'. Looking at plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, Dr. Faustus and Macbeth, each chapter includes ethnographic overviews of the performance of these plays as well as historical and theological perspectives on the issues they address. The author also utilizes scholarship from other academics, such as Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, in examining the relationship between art and culture. This helps readers of this book to look at religion in culture, and raise questions and explore ideas about how people appraise their religious values through an encounter with a performance. The Performance of Religion: Seeing the sacred in the theatre treads new ground in bringing performance and religious studies scholarship into direct conversation with one another. As such, it is essential reading for any academic with an interest in theology, religion and ethics and their expression in culture through the performing arts.

Drama and Digital Arts Cultures is a critical guide to the new forms of playful exploration, co-creativity, and improvised performance made possible by digital networked media. Drawing on examples from games, education, online media, technology-enabled performance and the creative industries, the book uses the elements of applied drama to frame our understanding of digital cultures. Exploring the connected real-world and virtual spaces where young people are making and sharing digital content, it draws attention to the fundamental applied drama conventions that infuse and activate this networked culture. Challenging descriptions of drama and digital technology as binary opposites, the book maps common principles and practice grounded in role, embodiment, performance, play, and identity that are being amplified and enhanced by the affordances of online media. Drama and Digital Arts Cultures draws together extensive original research including interviews with game designers, media producers, educators, artists and makers at the heart of these new digital cultures. Young people discuss their own creative practices and products, providing insight into a complex and evolving world being transformed by digital technologies. A practical guide to the field, it contains case studies and examples of the intersections of drama conventions and networked cultures drawn from the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Singapore and Australia. Written for scholars, educators, students and 'makers' everywhere, Drama and Digital Arts Cultures provides a clear understanding of how young people are blending creativity and learning with the powerful and empowering conventions of drama to create new forms of multimodal and transmedia storytelling.

Opening up contemporary debates about emotion in social and historical contexts, Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others investigates the relationship between emotion, memory, exile and language. Using a psychoanalytic framework, this monograph traces discourses of mourning (Klein), melancholia (Freud) and abjection (Kristeva) in Beckett's prose and drama, and demonstrates how Ireland and women are often Beckett's objects of loss. This study primarily focuses on Beckett's exploitation of ambivalent yet conscious use of psychoanalytic concepts in his works on an aesthetic level. It also addresses the impact of one of the key events in Beckett's life, his self-imposed exile, on his poetics of grieving. By exploring Beckett's ambiguous representations of his homeland - Ireland - and women in general and the mother in particular throughout his oeuvre, this study unveils his uneasy relationship with them - an anxious part of his identity.

Consider the Stars will not only be a delight to read, it will be a valued experience to be shared over and over again. Whether you make reading the seasonal stories a tradition or use its lessons to supplement your Bible study, church service or simply entertain your youth group, Consider the Stars will be an active tool in your library. In addition to the sketches and correlating lesson plans that make up the majority of the book, a short study of acting is included at the end of the book with its focus bent toward the Christian actor by understanding that everything a person chooses to do or not to do is based on a belief system. Why is drama important in presenting moral principles? It's often difficult to repeat what was preached even a moment ago, much less apply it, yet we can all recall a song or story that we heard even decades ago. Likewise, whether you believe he is who he says he is or not, Jesus is remembered mainly because he didn't tell us which way to go...he showed us through the stories he told and the life he lived.