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Author: Greg Walker Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell ISBN: 9780631217268 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 648
Book Description
This comprehensive anthology brings together a diverse collection of dramatic writing from the late fourteenth century to the onset of the Renaissance. The volume presents for the first time the key plays of the period in their entirety, alongside more unusual selections, covering religious narrative, religion and conscience, and politics and morality. The first section focuses on Biblical plays, including coherent sequences of the narrative Cycle plays from York and N-Town and supporting pageants from Chester and Wakefield. This approach allows a clear narrative line to develop, and permits the comparison of the treatment of key stories between the Cycles. The selected material demonstrates how the drama of the towns and cities of East Anglia and the North of England mediated religious culture to a heterodox urban audience, and explored biblical events in an intensely contemporary setting. In the second and third sections, the attention turns to secular drama, and the Moral Plays and Interludes. The featured texts illustrate the range of themes and issues covered, from the salvation of the individual human soul to the renovation of the political nation, and the variety of settings and audiences for which the plays were designed. The flexibility of the Interlude form is explored, as are the ways in which it was utilised by playwrights and their patrons to address issues of direct political and social concern to them and their audiences. Medieval Drama: An Anthology is an indispensable guide to the breadth and depth of dramatic activity in medieval Britain.
Author: Greg Walker Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell ISBN: 9780631217268 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 648
Book Description
This comprehensive anthology brings together a diverse collection of dramatic writing from the late fourteenth century to the onset of the Renaissance. The volume presents for the first time the key plays of the period in their entirety, alongside more unusual selections, covering religious narrative, religion and conscience, and politics and morality. The first section focuses on Biblical plays, including coherent sequences of the narrative Cycle plays from York and N-Town and supporting pageants from Chester and Wakefield. This approach allows a clear narrative line to develop, and permits the comparison of the treatment of key stories between the Cycles. The selected material demonstrates how the drama of the towns and cities of East Anglia and the North of England mediated religious culture to a heterodox urban audience, and explored biblical events in an intensely contemporary setting. In the second and third sections, the attention turns to secular drama, and the Moral Plays and Interludes. The featured texts illustrate the range of themes and issues covered, from the salvation of the individual human soul to the renovation of the political nation, and the variety of settings and audiences for which the plays were designed. The flexibility of the Interlude form is explored, as are the ways in which it was utilised by playwrights and their patrons to address issues of direct political and social concern to them and their audiences. Medieval Drama: An Anthology is an indispensable guide to the breadth and depth of dramatic activity in medieval Britain.
Author: Lawrence M. Clopper Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226110303 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question. Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.
Author: Katie Normington Publisher: DS Brewer ISBN: 9781843840275 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
Evidence from Records of Early English Drama, social, literary and cultural sources are drawn together in order to investigate how performances within the late Middle Ages were both shaped by, and shaped, the public image of women."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Jody Enders Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801487835 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.
Author: Katie Normington Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 074565486X Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 189
Book Description
Medieval English Drama provides a fresh introduction to the dramatic and festive practices of England in the late Middle Ages. The book places particular emphasis on the importance of the performance contexts of these events, bringing to life a period before permanent theatre buildings when performances took place in a wide variety of locations and had to fight to attract and maintain the attention of an audience. Showing the interplay between dramatic and everyday life, the book covers performances in convents, churches, parishes, street processions and parades, and in particular distinguishes between modes of outdoor and indoor performance. Katie Normington aids the reader to a fuller understanding of these early English dramatic practices by explaining the significance of the place of performance, the particularities of spectatorship for each event and how the conventions of the form of drama were manipulated to address its reception. Audiences considered range from cloistered members, congregations and parish members to urban citizens, nobles and royalty. Undergraduate students of literature of this period will find this an approachable and illuminating guide.
Author: Michael Norton Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications ISBN: 1580442633 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
The expression "liturgical drama" was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. This ground-breaking work examines "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them.
Author: O. B. Hardison Jr. Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421430878 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
Originally published in 1965. The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis—the earliest of all medieval dramas—is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.
Author: Richard Beadle Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139827928 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition continues to provide an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters, including one on the cultural significance of early drama. A thoroughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.
Author: Lynette R. Muir Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521542104 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
This book presents a detailed survey and analysis of the surviving corpus of biblical drama from all parts of medieval Christian Europe. Over five hundred plays from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries are examined, in a wide-ranging discussion which makes available the full scope of this important part of theatre history. The volume is specially organised to provide a complete overview of major aspects of medieval biblical theatre, including the theatrical community of both audience and players; the major plays and cycles; and the legacy of medieval biblical theatre. The book also includes valuable appendices with information on the liturgical calendar, processions, and the Mass and the Bible.
Author: David Bevington Publisher: Hackett Publishing ISBN: 1624665667 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 1105
Book Description
This reprint (with updated 'Suggestions for Further Reading') of the Houghton Mifflin edition makes David Bevington's classic anthology of medieval drama available again at an affordable price.
Author: Greg Walker
Author: Greg Walker
Author: Lawrence M. Clopper
Author: Katie Normington
Author: Jody Enders
Author: Katie Normington
Author: Michael Norton
Author: O. B. Hardison Jr.
Author: Richard Beadle
Author: Lynette R. Muir
Author: David Bevington