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Theater of a City
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.
eBook
Labors Lost
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.
eBook
Stagestruck
Stagestrucktraces the making of a vibrant French theater industry between the reign of Louis XIV and the French Revolution. During this era more than eighty provincial and colonial cities celebrated the inauguration of their first public playhouses. These theaters emerged as the most prominent urban cultural institutions in prerevolutionary France, becoming key sites for the articulation and contestation of social, political, and racial relationships. Combining rich description with nuanced analysis based on extensive archival evidence, Lauren R. Clay illuminates the wide-ranging consequences of theater's spectacular growth for performers, spectators, and authorities in cities throughout France as well as in the empire's most important Atlantic colony, Saint-Domingue.
Clay argues that outside Paris the expansion of theater came about through local initiative, civic engagement, and entrepreneurial investment, rather than through actions or policies undertaken by the royal government and its agents. Reconstructing the business of theatrical production, she brings to light the efforts of a wide array of investors, entrepreneurs, directors, and actors-including women and people of color-who seized the opportunities offered by commercial theater to become important agents of cultural change.
Portraying a vital and increasingly consumer-oriented public sphere beyond the capital,Stagestruckoverturns the long-held notion that cultural change flowed from Paris and the royal court to the provinces and colonies. This deeply researched book will appeal to historians of Europe and the Atlantic world, particularly those interested in the social and political impact of the consumer revolution and the forging of national and imperial cultural networks. In addition to theater and literary scholars, it will attract the attention of historians and sociologists who study business, labor history, and the emergence of the modern French state.
eBook
Dramaturgy and architecture : theatre, utopia and the built environment
\"Dramaturgy and Architecture approaches modern and postmodern theatre's contribution to the way we think about the buildings and spaces we inhabit. It discusses in detail ways in which theatre and performance have critiqued and intervened in everyday spaces, modelled our dreams or fears and made proposals for the future. Cathy Turner examines the tensions that are inherent in considering the architectural aspects of dramaturgy, where the stage appears as a constellation of objects, figures and structures. She concludes that where theatre meets architecture in re-imagining the world, it tends to shimmer between criticism, warning and proposal. The book takes an inclusive approach, connecting the plays of Ibsen and Shaw to the concerns of later-devised and visual dramaturgies. It digs into the history of site-based and visual theatre in a postdramatic mode, articulating the ways in which it is informed by the work of the Russian Constructivists, Bauhaus artists, Situationists and others. New material on theatre in British Garden Cities is set alongside a discussion of the more famous work by Jacques-Dalcroze in Germany's Gartenstadt Hellerau. The well-known site-specific work of Brith Gof is unusually approached through the contribution of co-director Cliff McLucas. Recent and in some cases little known works by The Builders Association, Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells, Krzyztof Wodiczko, Robert Wilson, NVA and Wrights & Sites are described in detail\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre
This series of essays by prominent academics and practitioners investigates in detail the history of performance in the classical Greek and Roman world. Beginning with the earliest examples of 'dramatic' presentation in the epic cycles and reaching through to the latter days of the Roman Empire and beyond, this 2007 Companion covers many aspects of these broad presentational societies. Dramatic performances that are text-based form only one part of cultures where presentation is a major element of all social and political life. Individual chapters range across a two thousand year timescale, and include specific chapters on acting traditions, masks, properties, playing places, festivals, religion and drama, comedy and society, and commodity, concluding with the dramatic legacy of myth and the modern media. The book addresses the needs of students of drama and classics, as well as anyone with an interest in the theatre's history and practice.
eBook
Actors and icons of the ancient theater
Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater examines actors and their popular reception from the origins of theater in Classical Greece to the Roman Empire Presents a highly original viewpoint into several new and contested fields of study Offers the first systematic survey of evidence for the spread of theater outside Athens and the impact of the expansion of theater upon actors and dramatic literature Addresses a study of the privatization of theater and reveals how it was driven by political interests Challenges preconceived notions about theater history
eBook