Renaissance drama

The Orwin publications of George Ripley's Compound of Alchemy (1591) and the English Faust Book (1592): A coincidental John Dee-Edward Kelley connection, intentional suppression, or both?

by Teresa Burns

Paper presented at the April 20, 2012 Science and the Occult Conference held at Purdue.
The Powerpoint... more Paper presented at the April 20, 2012 Science and the Occult Conference held at Purdue.
The Powerpoint presentation associated with the paper is uploaded in the "Talks" section. I'm re-editing the paper for the conference proceedings and will upload the final draft here.

http://uwplatt.academia.edu/TeresaBurns/Talks/80898/The_Orwin_publications_of_George_Ripleys_Compound_of_Alchemy_1591_and_the_English_Faust_Book_1592_A_coincidental_John_Dee-Edward_Kelley_connection_intentional_suppression_or_both

“Play-Books Lost”: The Fire at the Fortune, The Admiral’s Men, and the History Play

by Rebecca Munson

For the Shakespeare Association of America seminar "Lacunae in Theater History."

On December 9, 1621 a fire destroyed the Fortune Theater, home of the extremely successful Palsgrave’s Company... more On December 9, 1621 a fire destroyed the Fortune Theater, home of the extremely successful Palsgrave’s Company (formerly known as the Admiral’s Company and Prince Henry’s players).  John Chamberlain reported in a letter that the theater, which had been regarded as the finest in town, “was quite burnt down in two hours, and all their apparel and play-books lost, whereby these poor companions are quite undone.” The absence of play texts from the company’s illustrious and prosperous past is thus one of the most easily explicable gaps in our records of the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.  This absence is accompanied, however, by a wealth of detailed information provided by Philip Henslowe’s meticulous record-keeping.  Scholars of the period are thus in the maddening position of having an excellent idea of exactly what it is they are missing. 

This paper concerns a subset of these missing plays – those that take history as their subject.  Alfred Harbage, in The Annals of English Drama 975-1700, offers several generic categories for plays that deal with history (including, along with English history, “Foreign,” “Classical,” “Biblical,” “Pseudo” and “Allegorical”).  According to his categories, over time the company possessed at least seventy-nine history plays of which sixty-five are now lost.  In contrast, we have record of only thirty history plays owned by the King’s Men (formerly the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) during the same time span, and a full seventeen of these plays survive.  Additionally, of the seventeen, ten are Shakespeare’s history plays. This study focuses on the English history play as a means of considering the role of the lost Admiral’s plays in our understanding of the genre.  It uses the fact of the missing Admiral’s plays to reassess the general critical consensus concerning Shakespeare’s central role in the popularity and development of the form and to imagine what a critical narrative of the history play might be like had the Admiral’s plays survived.

"The Marks of Sovereignty": The Division of the Kingdom and the Division of the Mind in King Lear.

by Rebecca Munson

Published in 'Pacific Coast Philology' v. 46 (2011): 13-27

The causal relationship between Lear's division of the kingdom and descent into madness has divided critics for... more The causal relationship between Lear's division of the kingdom and descent into madness has divided critics for centuries.  This paper aims to illuminate the inherent connection between Lear’s mental state and the state of the kingdom through an exploration of the dual nature of the term sovereignty—of mind and of state—in the play.

"Gothic Shakespeare on the Romantic Stage." Co-written with Robert Miles. Gothic Shakespeare. Ed. John Drakasis and Dale Townsend. Accents on Shakespeare series. Routledge, 2008.

by Michael Gamer

Review of Clifford Davidson and Peter Happe, eds. The Worlde and the Chylde

by Douglas W. Hayes

Mundus et infans: a dramaturgical edition

by Douglas W. Hayes

Shakespeare, sound and sense

by Katherine Butler

Book Review

'Female Body as Geosomatic Apotrope in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton'.

by Maura Giles-Watson

Mapping the Premodern: Selected Proceedings of the Newbury Library Center for Renaissance Studies 26th Graduate Student Conference, 2008.

'Beyond MacMorris? Shakespeare, Ireland and Critical Contexts' in Celtic Shakespeare: the Bard and the Borderers. Ed. Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane. (Ashgate, forthcoming)

by Stephen O'Neill

Review of Frederick Keifer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters

by Douglas W. Hayes

Published in Sixteenth-Century Journal 36.2 (Summer 2005): 516-17.

The Language of Love: Rhetoric and Sexual Identity in the Late Middle Scots Play Philotus

by Douglas W. Hayes

Published in Proceedings of the Fifteenth Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature (Moorhead: MSUP 2008).

Rewriting History: Exploring the Individuality of Shakespeare's history plays

by Pete Orford

PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2006

‘Rewriting History’ is a reappraisal of Shakespeare’s history cycle, exploring its origins, its popularity and its... more ‘Rewriting History’ is a reappraisal of Shakespeare’s history cycle, exploring its origins, its popularity and its effects before challenging its dominance on critical and theatrical perceptions of the history plays.
A critical history of the cycle shows how external factors such as patriotism, bardolatory, character-focused criticism and the editorial decision of the First Folio are responsible for the cycle, more so than any inherent aspects of the plays.
The performance history of the cycle charts the initial innovations made in the twentieth century which have affected our perception of characters and key scenes in the texts. I then argue how the cycle has become increasingly restrictive, lacking innovation and consequently undervaluing the potential of the histories.
Having accounted for the history of the cycle to date, the second part of my thesis looks at the consequent effects upon each history play, and details how each play can be performed and analysed individually.
I close my thesis with the suggestion that a compromise between individual and serial perceptions is warranted, where both ideas are acknowledged equally for their effects and defects. By broadening our ideas about these plays we can appreciate the dramatic potential locked within them.

The deployment of artificial and natural beards in the plays of Richard Brome

by Eleanor Rycroft

‘The Play of the Weather in Performance in the Great Hall at Hampton Court’, Medieval English Theatre 31 (2009) 13-27

by Eleanor Rycroft

'The Play of The Weather in Performance in the Great Hall at Hampton Court’ reports on the AHRC-funded project... more 'The Play of The Weather in Performance in the Great Hall at Hampton Court’ reports on the AHRC-funded project ‘Staging the Henrician Court’, a collaboration between Oxford Brookes and Edinburgh Universities, with the cooperation of Historic Royal Palaces. The main focus of this was a series of experimental productions of Heywood’s Play of the Weather in the Great Hall at Hampton Court. The report speculates on the nuances and tone of courtly performance, and Heywood’s resultant attitude to his characters. It discusses significant staging decisions (not to have a substitute ‘Henry’ in the audience, not to use male actors in female roles), with a particular interest in the physical placing of the audience, and in the lighting, simulated in ingenious ways compatible with Health and Safety. Also discussed are the advantages and disadvantages of collaboration between academic and professional theatre practitioners, and the conservation constraints on planning a production in a major historical venue. Discussions afterwards turned up other possibilities, such as the adoption of more emblematic costume, and the use of boys as actors.

"Performance as Profanation: Holy Tongue and Comic Stage in Tsahut bedihuta deqiddushin."

by Yair Lipshitz

Renaissance Drama 36-37 (2010), pp. 125-156.
[Special Issue: Italy in the Drama of Europe]

'The Fury of Men's Gullets': Consuming Masculinity in City Comedy 1598-1614

by Jade Marshall

September, 2010

Scholarship on consumption in the early modern period has tended to concentrate on consuming women, and this... more Scholarship on consumption in the early modern period has tended to concentrate on consuming women, and this particular stance has been supported by the analysis of city comedy. This dissertation argues that men in early modern city comedy are also depicted as voracious consumers and that this is paralleled in the early modern construction of masculinity. The early modern belief in Galen’s teachings meant a symbiosis of the psychological and the physiological, hence the notion of the psychophysiological self in which both material and mental processes contributed to subjectivity. This self was both constructed and deconstructed by consumption; by the food it ate and the goods it handled. The acts and discourses of consumption, which fill city comedy, act as a somatic bridge between the categories of fantasy and materiality by which male characters could negotiate their society and their role within it.

Rafe's Rebellion: Reconsidering The Knight of the Burning Pestle

by Robert Zacharias

Renaissance and Reformation 31.3 (Summer 2008): 103-126. Renaissance and Reformation 31.3 (Summer 2008): 103-126.

The Rape of Lucrece (Le Viol de Lucrèce) Shakespeare Bulletin, 2007 (review)

by Nathalie Rivere de Carles

Visions

by Nizar Zouidi

Art and Literature

by Dawn Lewcock

Printed with permission from the Conrtinuum International Publishing Company.

Previously published in The Continuum Encyclopedia of British lLterature. Serafin and Myer (eds) 2003

This article considers artistic representations associated with literature in English or with English links of some... more This article considers artistic representations associated with literature in English or with English links of some kind. For the purposes of argument I am assuming that “literature” encompasses religious as well as secular writing.