The White Devil: A Critical Reader

2016-11-17
The White Devil: A Critical Reader

PDF The White Devil: A Critical Reader Download

  • Author:
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1472587413
  • Category : Drama
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 312

The White Devil is one of the most violent and most fascinating plays in English theatrical history. It is also a notoriously challenging work; this volume offers a practical, accessible and thought-provoking guide to the play, surveying its major themes and critical reception. It also provides a detailed and up-to-date history of the play's performance, beginning with its first staging in 1611 staging and ending with the RSC's 2014 revival. Moving through to four new critical essays, it opens up cutting-edge perspectives on the work, and finishes with a practical guide to pedagogical approaches and resources. Detailing web-based and production-related resources, and including an annotated bibliography of critical works, the guide will equip teachers and facilitate students' understanding of this complex play.

Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader

2023-06-29
Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader

PDF Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader Download

  • Author: Peter Kirwan
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350270180
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 265

One of the earliest domestic tragedies, Arden of Faversham is a powerful Elizabethan drama based on the real-life murder of Thomas Arden. This Critical Reader presents the first collection of essays specifically focused upon Arden of Faversham. It highlights the way in which this important play from the early 1590s stands at several different critical intersections. Focused research chapters propose new directions for exploring the play in the light of ecocriticism, genre studies, critical race studies and narratives of dispossession. It also looks forward to Arden of Faversham's role and status in a less author-centred critical climate. Chapters explore how this anonymous and canonically marginal play has been approached in the past by scholars and theatre-makers and the frameworks that have offered productive insight into its unique features. The volume includes chapters covering a wide range of critical discourses and resources available for its study, as well as offering practical approaches to the play in the classroom.

The White Devil

2021-07-15
The White Devil

PDF The White Devil Download

  • Author: John Webster
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350059951
  • Category : Drama
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 221

This fully re-edited, modernised play text is accompanied by insightful commentary notes, while its lively introduction explains why Webster's interests in complex female lead characters and questions of social tension related to sexuality, gender, race, and law and equity – unusual for the play's time – have led to its increasing relevance for modern audiences and readers. Exploring the challenges of staging this highly melodramatic play, Lara Bovilsky guides you through the most interesting points of its rich performance history, and explores the onslaught of recent productions with race-conscious and regendered casts. Analysing its masterful poetry, she shows how the work can be harnessed to engage debate about the abuse of political and religious authority, the troubling fruits of economic desperation, and personal freedom, and empowers you to do likewise. Supplemented by a plot summary, annotated bibliography, production images, and essential contextual grounding in the court scandals that inspired Webster's tragedy and Webster's unusual composition practices, this edition is the most enlightening and engaging you will find.

Edward II: A Critical Reader

2017-02-23
Edward II: A Critical Reader

PDF Edward II: A Critical Reader Download

  • Author:
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1472584058
  • Category : Drama
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 320

Edward II: A Critical Reader gives students, teachers and scholars alike an overview of the play's reception both in the theatre and among artists and critics, from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 21st. The volume also offers a series of new perspectives on the play by leading experts in the field of early modern history and culture. Bolstered with a timeline tracking Marlowe's life and work, an up-to-date bibliography and an extensive index, this collection is an ideal and definitive guide to Edward II.

A Narratology of Drama

2022-01-19
A Narratology of Drama

PDF A Narratology of Drama Download

  • Author: Christine Schwanecke
  • Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
  • ISBN: 3110724111
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 433

This volume argues against Gérard Genette’s theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

The Revenger's Tragedy: A Critical Reader

2016-10-20
The Revenger's Tragedy: A Critical Reader

PDF The Revenger's Tragedy: A Critical Reader Download

  • Author: Brian Walsh
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1472585429
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 320

The Revenger's Tragedy is one of the most vital, important, and enduring tragedies of the Jacobean era, one of the few non-Shakespearean plays of that period that is still regularly revived on stage and taught in classrooms. The play is notable for its piercing insight into human depravity, its savage humour, and its florid theatricality. This collection of new essays offers students an invaluable overview of the play's critical and performance history as well as four critical essays offering a range of new perspectives.

Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England

2017-09-05
Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England

PDF Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England Download

  • Author: Lucia Nigri
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1351967541
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 166

This collection examines the widespread phenomenon of hypocrisy in literary, theological, political, and social circles in England during the years after the Reformation and up to the Restoration. Bringing together current critical work on early modern subjectivity, performance, print history, and private and public identities and space, the collection provides readers with a way into the complexity of the term, by offering an overview of different forms of hypocrisy, including educational practice, social transaction, dramatic technique, distorted worship, female deceit, print controversy, and the performance of demonic possession. Together these approaches present an interdisciplinary examination of a term whose meanings have always been assumed, yet never fully outlined, despite the proliferation of publications on aspects of hypocrisy such as self-fashioning and disguise. Questions the chapters collectively pose include: how did hypocritical discourse conceal concerns relating to social status, gender roles, religious doctrine, and print culture? How was hypocrisy manifest materially? How did different literary genres engage with hypocrisy?

The Changeling: A Critical Reader

2019-05-30
The Changeling: A Critical Reader

PDF The Changeling: A Critical Reader Download

  • Author: Mark Hutchings
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350011398
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 303

This volume offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this major Renaissance tragedy, surveying its key themes and evolving critical responses over the course of nearly four centuries. Providing a uniquely detailed and up-to-date account of the play's rich stage history, it demonstrates how useful Performance Studies is to our understanding of early modern drama, and looks closely at major recent productions on both sides of the Atlantic, notably the 2014 production of the 'Jacobean' indoor space, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London. In a series of critical essays, the guide offers fresh perspectives on the characters' mechanical psychology, the influence of Spanish Golden Age literature on Middelton and Rowley, and how the play has been treated on the modern stage and screen. Featuring a guide to digital resources and an annotated bibliography, this collection is a definitive guide to The Changeling.

Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader

2019-01-10
Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader

PDF Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader Download

  • Author: Efterpi Mitsi
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350014184
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 288

Troilus and Cressida: A Critical Reader offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this complex problem play, surveying its key themes and evolving critical preoccupations. Considering its generic ambiguity and experimentalism, it also provides a uniquely detailed and up-to-date history of the play's stage performance from Dryden's rewriting up to Mark Ravenhill and Elizabeth LeCompte's controversial 2012 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Wooster Group. Moving through to four new critical essays, the guide opens up fresh perspectives on the play's iconoclastic nature and its key themes, ranging from issues of gender and sexuality to Elizabethan politics, from the uses of antiquity to questions of cultural translation, with particular attention paid on Troilus' “Greekness”. The volume finishes with a helpful guide to critical and web-based resources. Discussing the ways in which this challenging and acerbic play can be brought to life in the classroom, it suggests performance-based strategies, designed to engage with the dramaturgical and theatrical dimensions of the text; close-reading exercises with an emphasis on rhetoric, metaphor and the practice of “troping”; and a series of tools designed to situate the play in a range of contexts, including its classical and critical frameworks.

The Merchant of Venice: A Critical Reader

2020-10-15
The Merchant of Venice: A Critical Reader

PDF The Merchant of Venice: A Critical Reader Download

  • Author: Sarah Hatchuel
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350082309
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 321

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: - Essays on the play's critical and performance history - A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play - A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has often been labelled a 'problem play', and throughout the ages it has been an object of both fascination and repulsion. Without neglecting the socio-political and religious issues that are at the heart of the play, this collection of critical essays invites readers to rediscover the variety of approaches that this multifaceted work calls for, exploring its gender aspects, its rich mythological background, its legal matters and the ways in which it has been adapted to the screen. Essays consider the play in relation to its sources, genre and religion, historical and socio-political context and its critical reception and performance history.