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Seeing Shakespeare's Style offers new ways for readers to perceive
Shakespeare and, by extension, literary texts generally. Organized
as a series of studies of Shakespeare's plays and poems, poetry,
and prose, it looks at the inner functioning of language and form
in works from all phases of this writer's career. Because the very
concept of literary style has dropped out of so many of our
conversations about writing, we need new ways to understand how
words, phrases, speeches, and genres in literature work. Responding
to this need, this book shows how visual representations of writing
can lead to a deeper understanding of language's textures and
effects. Starting with chapters that a beginning reader of
Shakespeare can benefit from, its second half puts these tools to
use in more in-depth examinations of Shakespeare's language and
style. Although focused on Shakespeare's works, and the works of
his contemporaries, this book provides tools for all readers of
literature by defining style as material, graphic, and shaped by
the various media in which all writers work.
This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected
form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in
performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert
Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in
dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions
performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most
basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the
prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher
spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing
claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces,
authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual
theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way,
prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders
of cultural practice and perception. Close readings of prologues by
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and
Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the
world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed
examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors
provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a
perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays'
socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and
action.
This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected
form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in
performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert
Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in
dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions
performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England. While its most
basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the
prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher
spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing
claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces,
authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual
theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way,
prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders
of cultural practice and perception. Close readings of prologues by
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and
Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the
world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed
examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors
provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a
perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays'
socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and
action.
Everyman and Mankind are morality plays which mark the turn of the
medieval period to the early modern, with their focus on the
individual. Everyman follows a man's journey towards death and his
efforts to secure himself a life thereafter, whilst Mankind shows a
man battling with temptation and sin, often with great humour. Both
texts are modernised here and edited to the highest standards of
scholarship, with full on-page commentaries giving the depth of
information and insight associated with all Arden editions. The
comprehensive, illustrated introduction argues that the plays
signal the birth of the early modern consciousness and puts them in
their historic and religious contexts. An account is also given of
the staging and performance history of the plays and their critical
history and significance. With a wealth of helpful and incisive
commentary this is the finest edition of the plays available.
Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation
of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked,
marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes.
Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the
multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the
East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical
space to represent the concept of the East in drama. This volume
re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern
English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of
early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the
European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions
of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced
the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting
representations of the East were communicated on stage through the
material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance
effects. The collection emphasizes these material aspects of
dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including
George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of
Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them
in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John
Fletcher's The Island Princess.
Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern
England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as
the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without
human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the
manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was
criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public
theatre was emerging - to great controversy - as the perfect medium
to display, analyse and evaluate the newly autonomous power of
representation in its financial, magical and aesthetic forms. Money
and Magic in Early Modern Drama is especially timely in the current
era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which are just as
mysterious and occult in their operations as the germinal finance
of 16th-century London. Chapters examine the convergence of money
and magic in a wide range of early modern drama, from the anonymous
Mankind through Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson, concentrating on
such plays as The Alchemist, The New Inn and The Staple of News.
Several focus on Shakespeare, whose analysis of the relations
between finance, witchcraft and theatricality is particularly acute
in Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra and
The Winter's Tale.
Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' soliloquy is quoted more often than
any other passage in Shakespeare. It is arguably the most famous
speech in the Western world - though few of us can remember much
about it. This book carefully unpacks the individual words, phrases
and sentences of Hamlet's solioquy uin order to reveal how and why
it has achieved its remarkable hold on our culture. Hamlet's speech
asks us to ask some of the most serious questions there are
regarding knowledge and existence. In it, Shakespeare also expands
the limits of the English language. Douglas Bruster therefore reads
Hamlet's famous speech in 'slow motion' to highlight its material,
philosophical and cultural meaning and its resonance for
generations of actors, playgoers and readers. Douglas Bruster is
Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. He
is the author of Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare;
Quoting Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the Question of Culture; and,
with Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare's Theatre.
"Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books of truly vital
literary scholarship, each with its own distinctive form.
"Shakespeare Now!" recaptures the excitement of Shakespeare; it
doesn't assume we know him already, or that we know the best
methods for approaching his plays. "Shakespeare Now!" is a new
generation of critics, unafraid of risk, on a series of
intellectual adventures. Above all - it is a new Shakespeare,
freshly present in each volume. Hamlet's "To be or not to be"
soliloquy is quoted more often than almost any other passage in
Shakespeare. Parodies and advertisements show us that invoking even
its first two words is enough to imply the rest of the speech -
though few of us can recall much about it. For we like to think we
know this speech, even as we like to think we know our Shakespeare.
"To Be or Not to Be" takes this most famous speech and unpacks it's
meaning to reveal the questions and problems it raises. Hamlet's
speech asks us to ask serious questions about knowledge and
existence. The book asks what close attention to Shakespeare's
words can tell us about what we don't and perhaps can't know. If
this speech concerns what isn't knowable, what else is it about? Is
it or is it not about suicide? Do the King and Polonius overhear?
If so, does Hamlet know or care? What must we bring to it, as
readers? What about as audience members: to what do we need to pay
attention? This book reads the individual words, phrases and
sentences of Hamlet's famous speech in 'slow motion' to highlight
its material, philosophical and cultural meaning and its resonance
for generations of actors, playgoers and readers.
To interrupt, both on stage and off, is to wrest power. From the
Ghost's appearance in Hamlet to Celia's frightful speech in
Volpone, interruptions are an overlooked linguistic and dramatic
form that delineates the balance of power within a scene. This book
analyses interruptions as a specific form in dramatic literature,
arguing that these everyday occurrences, when transformed into
aesthetic phenomena, reveal illuminating connections: between
characters, between actor and audience, and between text and
reader. Focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson
and John Fletcher, Michael M. Wagoner examines interruptions that
occur through the use of punctuation and stage directions, as well
as through larger forms, such as conventions and dramaturgy. He
demonstrates how studying interruptions may indicate aspects of
authorial style - emphasizing a playwright's use and control of a
text - and how exploring relative power dynamics pushes readers and
audiences to reconsider key plays and characters, providing new
considerations of the relationships between Othello and Iago, or
Macbeth and the Ghost of Banquo.
Staging Britain's Past is the first study of the early modern
performance of Britain's pre-Roman history. The mythic history of
the founding of Britain by the Trojan exile Brute and the
subsequent reign of his descendants was performed through texts
such as Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc, Shakespeare’s King
Lear and Cymbeline, as well as civic pageants, court masques and
royal entries such as Elizabeth I’s 1578 entry to Norwich.
Gilchrist argues for the power of performed history to shape early
modern conceptions of the past, ancestry, and national destiny, and
demonstrates how the erosion of the Brutan histories marks a
transformation in English self-understanding and identity. When
published in 1608, Shakespeare’s King Lear claimed to be a
“True Chronicle History”. Lear was said to have ruled Britain
centuries before the Romans, a descendant of the mighty Trojan
Brute who had conquered Britain and slaughtered its barbaric
giants. But this was fake history. Shakespeare’s contemporaries
were discovering that Brute and his descendants, once widely
believed as proof of glorious ancient origins, were a mischievous
medieval invention. Offering a comprehensive account of the
extraordinary theatrical tradition that emerged from these Brutan
histories and the reasons for that tradition’s disappearance,
this study gathers all known evidence of the plays, pageants and
masques portraying Britain’s ancient rulers. Staging Britain's
Past reveals how the loss of England’s Trojan origins is
reflected in plays and performances from Gorboduc’s powerful
invocation of history to Cymbeline’s elegiac erosion of all
notions of historical truth.
Focusing on the practical means and media of Shakespeare's stage,
this study envisions horizons for his achievement in the theatre.
Bridging the gap between today's page- and stage-centred
interpretations, two renowned Shakespeareans demonstrate the artful
means by which Shakespeare responded to the competing claims of
acting and writing in the Elizabethan era. They examine how the
playwright explored issues of performance through the resonant trio
of clown, fool and cross-dressed boy actor. Like this trio, his
deepest and most captivating characters often attain their power
through the highly performative mode of 'personation' - through
playing the character as an open secret. Surveying the whole of the
playwright's career in the theatre, Shakespeare and the Power of
Performance offers not only compelling ways of approaching the
relation of performance and print in Shakespeare's works, but also
new models for understanding dramatic character itself.
Focussing on the practical means and media of Shakespeare's stage,
this study envisions new horizons for his achievement in the
theatre. Bridging the gap between today's page- and stage-centred
interpretations, two renowned Shakespeareans demonstrate the artful
means by which Shakespeare responded to the competing claims of
acting and writing in the Elizabethan era. They examine how the
playwright explored issues of performance through the resonant trio
of clown, fool, and cross-dressed boy actor. Like this trio, his
deepest and most captivating characters often attain their power
through the highly performative mode of 'personation' - through
playing the character as an open secret. Surveying the whole of the
playwright's career in the theatre, Shakespeare and the Power of
Performance offers not only compelling ways of approaching the
relation of performance and print in Shakespeare's works, but also
new models for understanding dramatic character itself.
William Shakespeare is perhaps the most frequently quoted author of
the English-speaking world. His plays, in turn, "quote" a wide
variety of sources, from books and ballads to persons and events.
In this dynamic study of Shakespeare's plays, Douglas Bruster
demonstrates that such borrowing can illuminate the world in which
Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights lived and worked,
while also shedding light on later cultures that quote his plays.
In contrast to the New Historicism's sometimes arbitrary linkage
of literary works with elements drawn from the surrounding culture,
"Quoting Shakespeare" focuses on the resources that writers used in
making their works. Bruster shows how this borrowing can give us
valuable insight into the cultural, historical, and political
positions of writers and their works. Because Shakespeare's plays
have often been quoted by other writers, this study also examines
what subsequent uses of Shakespeare's plays reveal about the
writers and cultures that use them. In this way, "Quoting
Shakespeare" insists that literary production and reception are
both integral to a historical approach to literature.
Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama
explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and
society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare
and the establishment of commercial theatres. He identifies in the
drama a materialist vision which has its origins in the climate of
uncertainty engendered by the rapidly expanding economy of London.
His examples range from the economic importance of cuckoldry to the
role of stage props as commodities, and the commercial significance
of the Troy story in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and he
offers new ways of reading English Renaissance drama, by returning
the theatre and the plays performed there, to its basis in the
material world.
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