The essays in Staging the Renaissance show the theatre to be the site of a rich confluence of cultural forces, the place where social meanings are both formed and transformed. The volume unites some of the most challenging issues in contemporary Renaissance studies and some of our best-known critics, including Stephen Orgel, Margaret Ferguson, Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Goldberg, Marjorie Garber, Lisa Jardine, and Jonathan Dollimore-- demonstrating the variety and vitality not only of contemporary criticism, but of Renaissance drama itself.

This collection of essays brings together leading scholars of the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies has concentrated on the human subject; the essays collected here bring objects--purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, tools, skulls--back into view. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture puts things back into relation with people, eliciting not only new critical readings of key texts, but also new configurations of Renaissance culture.

This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.

Series Information:
Essays from the English Institute

In Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory Jones and Stallybrass argue that the making and transmission of fabrics and clothing were central to the making of Renaissance culture. Their examination explores the role of clothes as forms of memory transmitted from master to servant, from friend to friend, from lover to lover. This book offers a close reading of literary texts, paintings, textiles, theatrical documents, and ephemera to reveal how clothing and textiles were crucial to gender, sexuality, and religion in the Renaissance.

Staging the Renaissance demonstrates the variety and vitality of both contemporary criticism and of Renaissance drama. The collected essays analyse the dynamic process within Renaissance drama where texts stage multiple collaborations between playwright, actor, stage, audience, and the pressures of the social, economic and political environment. They offer inspired critical reassessments of individual non-Shakespearean plays, rethinking both canonical classics and rediscovering such marginal texts as The Tragedy of Mariam.
Through such critical analysis, the Renaissance theatre emerges as a site of rich confluence of cultural forces; a place where social meanings are both formed and transformed.

Before his death from leukemia at the age of 36, Allon White had become known as one of the most important literary and cultural critics of his generation. This volume represents a summation of the work which transformed cultural studies in the 1980s.