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Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James? How do the concept of costume as high fashion and as self-fashioning, as disguise and as the very essence of theatre, relate to one other? How do portraits of poets help make the author readers want, and why should books, the embodiment of the word, be illustrated at all? What conventions connect image to text, and what impulses generated the great art collections of the early seventeenth century? In this richly illustrated collection on theatre, books, art and personal style, the eminent literary critic and cultural historian Stephen Orgel addresses himself to such questions in order to reflect generally on early modern representation and, in the largest sense, early modern performance. As wide-ranging as they are perceptive, the essays deal with Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton, with Renaissance magic and Renaissance costume, with books and book illustration, art collecting and mythography. All are recent, and five are hitherto unpublished.

\"Renaissance Acting Companies and their Plays explores the intimate and dynamic relationship between acting companies and playwrights in this seminal era in English theatre history. Siobhan Keenan's analysis includes chapters on the traditions and workings of contemporary acting companies, playwriting practices, stages and staging, audiences and patrons, each illustrated with detailed case studies of individual acting companies and their plays, including troupes such as Lady Elizabeth's players, 'Beeston's Boys' and the King's Men and works by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Brome and Heywood. We are accustomed to focusing on individual playwrights: Renaissance Acting Companies and their Plays makes the case that we also need to think about the companies for which dramatists wrote and with whose members they collaborated, if we wish to better understand the dramas of the English Renaissance stage\"-- Provided by publisher.

Streitberger details the adaptation of the Revels organization to the very different courts of the various monarchs, and explains how their personalities, principles, and policies shaped that adaptation.

In 1576, in a muddy field in Shoreditch, James Burbage erected London's first purpose-built commercial playhouse. A place of high culture and quick profit, run by cunning dreamers, the Theatre for the first time offered London's players the chance to control what they staged. At a time when playgoing was held to be close to a sin, this entertainment factory was a flashpoint for controversy - but would also become Shakespeare's first theatre, where he learned to ply his trade before his company moved to the Globe. Through the life of this little-known playhouse, Daniel Swift tells the story of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan stage began to flourish.

Arguing that the commercial stage depended on the unprecedented demographic growth and commercial vibrancy of London to fuel its own development, Jean E. Howard posits a particular synergy between the early modern stage and the city in which it flourished. In London comedy, place functions as the material arena in which social relations are regulated, urban problems negotiated, and city space rendered socially intelligible. Rather than simply describing London, the stage participated in interpreting it and giving it social meaning. Each chapter of this book focuses on a particular place within the city-the Royal Exchange, the Counters, London's whorehouses, and its academies of manners-and examines the theater's role in creating distinctive narratives about each. In these stories, specific locations are transformed into venues defined by particular kinds of interactions, whether between citizen and alien, debtor and creditor, prostitute and client, or dancing master and country gentleman. Collectively, they suggest how city space could be used and by whom, and they make place the arena for addressing pressing urban problems: demographic change and the influx of foreigners and strangers into the city; new ways of making money and losing it; changing gender roles within the metropolis; and the rise of a distinctive \"town culture\" in the West End. Drawing on a wide range of familiar and little-studied plays from four decades of a defining era of theater history,Theater of a Cityshows how the stage imaginatively shaped and responded to the changing face of early modern London.

\"The role of the audience takes on new importance when performance is reconceived as a dialectical activity. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between dramatic performance and audience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. That relationship is complicated by multiple conceptions of the audience: playwrights imagine their audiences; actors address them; the audience actually attending the play is yet another entity. The authors combine theatre history and cultural analysis with examinations of plays and productions to explore how those involved in early modern productions conceived of their audience, how audiences shaped the dramas they watched, and even how the roles of actor and audience member sometimes merged\"-- Provided by publisher.

Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities.Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays, Labors Lost retrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of women's work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life. Acknowledgments Introduction, Rebecca Totaro Section One: Making the Plague Serve Form and Function, 1563-1666 1: Writing the Plague in English Prose Satire, William Kerwin 2: Plague Space and Played Space in Urban Drama, 1604, Kelly J. Stage 3: Physical and Spiritual Illness: Narrative Appropriations of the Bills of Mortality, Erin Sullivan Section Two: Governing Bodies in Plague-Time 4: Contagious Figurations: Plague and the Impenetrable Nation after the Death of Elizabeth, Richelle Munkhoff 5: \"Thinking to pass unknown\": Measure for Measure, the Plague, and the Accession of James I, James D. Mardock Section Three: Performances, Playhouses, and the Sites of Re-Creation 6: \"Sweet recreation barred\": The Case for Playgoing in Plague-time, Nichole DeWall 7: Shakespeare’s Dual Lexicons of Plague: Infections in Speech and Space, Paula S. Berggren 8: \"A plague on both your houses\": Sites of Comfort and Terror in Early Modern Drama, Barbara H. Traister Section Four: Contemporary Turns 9: Plague in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Girardian Reading of Bottom and Hippolyta, Matthew Thiele 10: Dekker’s and Middleton’s Plague Pamphlets as Environmental Literature, Charles Whitney Afterword: Plague and Metaphor, Ernest B. Gilman Notes on Contributors Index Rebecca Totaro is Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. She is the author of Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton . Ernest Gilman is Professor of English at NYU. He is the author of Plague Writing in Early Modern England .

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which-though many of them are considered of great literary worth-were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.