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"English drama To 1500 History and criticism."
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The Queen's Dumbshows
No medieval writer reveals more about early English drama than John Lydgate, Claire Sponsler contends. Best known for his enormously long narrative poems The Fall of Princes and The Troy Book, Lydgate also wrote numerous verses related to theatrical performances and ceremonies. This rich yet understudied body of material includes mummings for London guildsmen and sheriffs, texts for wall hangings that combined pictures and poetry, a Corpus Christi procession, and entertainments for the young Henry VI and his mother.In The Queen's Dumbshows, Sponsler reclaims these writings to reveal what they have to tell us about performance practices in the late Middle Ages. Placing theatricality at the hub of fifteenth-century British culture, she rethinks what constituted drama in the period and explores the relationship between private forms of entertainment, such as household banquets, and more overtly public forms of political theater, such as royal entries and processions. She delineates the intersection of performance with other forms of representation such as feasts, pictorial displays, and tableaux, and parses the connections between the primarily visual and aural modes of performance and the reading of literary texts written on paper or parchment. In doing so, she has written a book of signal importance to scholars of medieval literature and culture, theater history, and visual studies.
eBook
Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare
Although representations of medieval Christians and Christianity are rarely subject to the same scholarly scrutiny as those of Jews and Judaism, \"the Christian\" is as constructed a term, category, and identity as \"the Jew.\" Medieval Christian authors created complex notions of Christian identity through strategic use of representations of Others: idealized Jewish patriarchs or demonized contemporary Jews; Woman represented as either virgin or whore. In Western thought, the Christian was figured as spiritual and masculine, defined in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish. Women and Jews are not simply the Other for the Christian exegetical tradition, however; they also represent sources of origin, as one cannot conceive of men without women or of Christianity without Judaism. The bifurcated representations of Woman and Jew found in the literature of the Middle Ages and beyond reflect the uneasy figurations of women and Jews as both insiders and outsiders to Christian society.Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeareprovides the first extended examination of the linkages of gender and Jewish difference in late medieval and early modern English literature. Focusing on representations of Jews and women in Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales, selections from medieval drama, and Shakespeare'sMerchant of Venice, Lampert explores the ways in which medieval and early modern authors used strategies of opposition to-and identification with-figures of Jews and women to create individual and collective Christian identities. This book shows not only how these questions are interrelated in the texts of medieval and early modern England but how they reveal the distinct yet similarly paradoxical places held by Woman and Jew within a longer tradition of Western thought that extends to the present day.
eBook
From Page to Performance
This book is a collection of 22 essays by scholars in the field of Medieval Drama, mostly relating to performance both past and present. Alford wrote one essay in the book.
eBook
Saints and the Audience in Middle English Biblical Drama
The study of saints in medieval biblical drama has often been neglected in favour of the study of sinners ? the villains and the rogues. InSaints and the Audience in Middle English Biblical Drama, Chester N. Scoville takes a different tack, examining the language and rhetoric of saintly characters in Middle English biblical plays. Scoville contends that the plays focus attention on the interaction between the divine realm and the human realm, that the saintly characters are key to seeing this interaction, and that the overall function of the plays is to instill in the audience a shared point of view defined both by doctrine and by experience.
By placing the rhetoric of the plays at the centre of his study, Scoville incorporates performative practices and historical contexts into the argument. Language, text, and persuasion are central in the rhetorical experience, as are non-verbal elements such as costume, movement, gesture, and scenery.Saints and the Audience in Middle English Biblical Dramafully and assiduously explains how biblical drama functioned in the society that experienced it.
eBook