Abstract:This essay attends to Beaumont's recent performance and reception history, documenting a range of academic and popular responses to demonstrate the challenges and affordances of engaging with Beaumont's plays. The first section examines several twenty-first century performances of Beaumont plays, focusing especially on the Globe's stimulating production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The second section considers how Beaumont was both acknowledged and ignored in 2016, the year of his 400th anniversary. The final section suggests some avenues for further research into the performance of Beaumont's plays.
{"title":"The Future Francis Beaumont","authors":"Eoin Price","doi":"10.12745/ET.20.2.3340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12745/ET.20.2.3340","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay attends to Beaumont's recent performance and reception history, documenting a range of academic and popular responses to demonstrate the challenges and affordances of engaging with Beaumont's plays. The first section examines several twenty-first century performances of Beaumont plays, focusing especially on the Globe's stimulating production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The second section considers how Beaumont was both acknowledged and ignored in 2016, the year of his 400th anniversary. The final section suggests some avenues for further research into the performance of Beaumont's plays.","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131069905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article traces the lineage of the popular performance set-piece of the 'oracular altar scene' from its inception in Jonson's Sejanus through its frequent reuse by the King's Men and their imitators later in the century. By doing so, it demonstrates how material practices of reuse in the seventeenth-century theatre helped shape the production of popular knowledge about the nature of 'pagan' ritual and its practitioners in the Stuart era of intensified antiquarian discovery and colonial expansion.
{"title":"Sejanus, the King's Men Altar Scenes, and the Theatrical Production of Paganism","authors":"John Kuhn","doi":"10.12745/ET.20.2.2952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12745/ET.20.2.2952","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article traces the lineage of the popular performance set-piece of the 'oracular altar scene' from its inception in Jonson's Sejanus through its frequent reuse by the King's Men and their imitators later in the century. By doing so, it demonstrates how material practices of reuse in the seventeenth-century theatre helped shape the production of popular knowledge about the nature of 'pagan' ritual and its practitioners in the Stuart era of intensified antiquarian discovery and colonial expansion.","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133288091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The Croxton Play of the Sacrament features a physician who has regularly been characterized as a quack and buffoon. This paper combines the play's historical and cultural context with a close reading of the text to argue that the doctor himself is a legitimate medical practitioner; the combined clowning of his servant and the foolishness of his patient make the physician appear comical. By considering possible performance choices and the relationship of the audience to the play's action, I suggest a more complex reading of a scene and character that have previously been too readily dismissed.
{"title":"The Physician and His Servant in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament","authors":"Jillian Linster","doi":"10.12745/ET.20.2.3028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12745/ET.20.2.3028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Croxton Play of the Sacrament features a physician who has regularly been characterized as a quack and buffoon. This paper combines the play's historical and cultural context with a close reading of the text to argue that the doctor himself is a legitimate medical practitioner; the combined clowning of his servant and the foolishness of his patient make the physician appear comical. By considering possible performance choices and the relationship of the audience to the play's action, I suggest a more complex reading of a scene and character that have previously been too readily dismissed.","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115402108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay explores the 'lives' of Francis Beaumont at the point of the four hundredth anniversary of his death, through elegies by John Earle and Thomas Pestell and hitherto unknown and newly interpreted biographical information that sheds fresh light on the relationship between his life and works. Focusing in particular on his plays The Scornful Lady and The Woman Hater, it argues that Beaumont and his regular collaborator, John Fletcher, mix (auto)biographical allusions with satire and fantasy. This analysis offers new perspectives on the ways in which their imaginations were sparked by their lived experience.
{"title":"Beaumont's Lives","authors":"Lucy Munro","doi":"10.12745/ET.20.2.3337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12745/ET.20.2.3337","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores the 'lives' of Francis Beaumont at the point of the four hundredth anniversary of his death, through elegies by John Earle and Thomas Pestell and hitherto unknown and newly interpreted biographical information that sheds fresh light on the relationship between his life and works. Focusing in particular on his plays The Scornful Lady and The Woman Hater, it argues that Beaumont and his regular collaborator, John Fletcher, mix (auto)biographical allusions with satire and fantasy. This analysis offers new perspectives on the ways in which their imaginations were sparked by their lived experience.","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116728923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay posits that the earliest printed edition of Sejanus shows how power is not inherent to particular statements or actions, but apprehended, rather, in their relationships to the responses around them. Conventionally, critics find the emperor Tiberius to be in control of events in the play, and textual scholars argue that Jonson shapes the text in order to ensure this interpretation. Here, though, I show how techniques of marking parentheses present different kinds of onlooking and overhearing on the page, and I suggest that these techniques mark a strategy of allowing and sustaining multiple interpretations of Jonson's Tiberius.
{"title":"'[Overhearing]': Printing Parentheses and Reading Power in Ben Jonson's Sejanus","authors":"I. Burrows","doi":"10.12745/ET.20.2.2811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12745/ET.20.2.2811","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay posits that the earliest printed edition of Sejanus shows how power is not inherent to particular statements or actions, but apprehended, rather, in their relationships to the responses around them. Conventionally, critics find the emperor Tiberius to be in control of events in the play, and textual scholars argue that Jonson shapes the text in order to ensure this interpretation. Here, though, I show how techniques of marking parentheses present different kinds of onlooking and overhearing on the page, and I suggest that these techniques mark a strategy of allowing and sustaining multiple interpretations of Jonson's Tiberius.","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114256258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:I argue that the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) expresses a more intense sensitivity to polysemous typography than has been critically articulated. The orthography, typography, and layout functioned as rich sources of meaning-making for early modern readers, poets, and publishers. Performances happened on the playtext page that were often unavailable in a live theatrical setting. This article makes a crucial critical intervention by recuperating the poetic value of Q1, a text that has historically generated interest mostly within analytical bibliography, performance studies, and character studies. Readers were sensitive to how visual wordplay activated important themes to which my critical analysis attends.
{"title":"The Hamlet First Quarto (1603) & the Play of Typography","authors":"E. Boeckeler","doi":"10.12745/ET.21.1.3189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12745/ET.21.1.3189","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:I argue that the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) expresses a more intense sensitivity to polysemous typography than has been critically articulated. The orthography, typography, and layout functioned as rich sources of meaning-making for early modern readers, poets, and publishers. Performances happened on the playtext page that were often unavailable in a live theatrical setting. This article makes a crucial critical intervention by recuperating the poetic value of Q1, a text that has historically generated interest mostly within analytical bibliography, performance studies, and character studies. Readers were sensitive to how visual wordplay activated important themes to which my critical analysis attends.","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"112 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122115115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article discusses the critical apparatus surrounding Dekker and Middleton's well-known play The Roaring Girl. While previous discussions of the text have focused mostly on Moll's cross-dressing, I instead look at Moll's sword skills to show how the lascivious behaviour of London's men produces her gender performance, which seems unruly by early modern standards. I also examine other rituals of gender construction that texture previous analyses of Moll.
{"title":"'Untruss a Point'—Interiority, Sword Combat, and Gender in The Roaring Girl","authors":"Matthew Carter","doi":"10.12745/ET.21.1.3145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.12745/ET.21.1.3145","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses the critical apparatus surrounding Dekker and Middleton's well-known play The Roaring Girl. While previous discussions of the text have focused mostly on Moll's cross-dressing, I instead look at Moll's sword skills to show how the lascivious behaviour of London's men produces her gender performance, which seems unruly by early modern standards. I also examine other rituals of gender construction that texture previous analyses of Moll.","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121409597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-07-20DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316460818
Wendy L. Wall
When Queen Elizabeth brought the court on progress to country estates, she would find herself accosted ‘spontaneously’ by satyrs, nymphs, shepherds, pining lovers, dairymaids, or wild men, characters who conscripted her to ‘perform’ in a sprawling theatrical landscape. Country-house entertainments were ephemeral, site-specific, interactive, collaboratively produced, and miscellaneous events with the feel of flash-mob ‘happenings’: they involved pageants, petitions, speeches, poems, props, and skits. In The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender, Kolkovich argues that these seemingly marginal entertainments were, in actuality, a coherent literary genre and an important site for political and ethical negotiation in the Elizabethan era, not least because they provided an opportunity for elite women to participate in political debate and policy-making. In presenting the first scholarly monograph to think comprehensively about the genre and to consider its evolving meanings in performance and in print, Kolkovich offers rich historical, literary, and social contexts for understanding a fascinating and under-read genre. Scholars have long recognized estate entertainments as occasions for news, gossip, and political self-promotion: hosts could air propaganda and make covert bids for advancement through the guise of extravagant praise for the sovereign. Kolkovich demonstrates, however, that these assemblages can be understood as more politically and culturally complex when considered in situ, whether in the setting of particular estates or as printed forms circulating in various book markets. She situates this genre as part of an emerging national literature that negotiated the boundaries of overlapping communities (region and nation) and the relative power afforded to monarch and competing authorities (including the host and the pageant ‘devisers’). By insisting on the crucial ‘locatedness’ of these negotiations as they materialized in performances and as circulating artifacts, Elizabethan Country House Entertainment succeeds in making a case for the significance and scope of a genre that almost defies categorization. After reading this book, the reader can immediately grasp the productive instability of these entertainments: as ephemeral performances that have to be reconstructed from partial and scattered evidence; as mutable book objects subject to multiple
{"title":"The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender by Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (review)","authors":"Wendy L. Wall","doi":"10.1017/CBO9781316460818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316460818","url":null,"abstract":"When Queen Elizabeth brought the court on progress to country estates, she would find herself accosted ‘spontaneously’ by satyrs, nymphs, shepherds, pining lovers, dairymaids, or wild men, characters who conscripted her to ‘perform’ in a sprawling theatrical landscape. Country-house entertainments were ephemeral, site-specific, interactive, collaboratively produced, and miscellaneous events with the feel of flash-mob ‘happenings’: they involved pageants, petitions, speeches, poems, props, and skits. In The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender, Kolkovich argues that these seemingly marginal entertainments were, in actuality, a coherent literary genre and an important site for political and ethical negotiation in the Elizabethan era, not least because they provided an opportunity for elite women to participate in political debate and policy-making. In presenting the first scholarly monograph to think comprehensively about the genre and to consider its evolving meanings in performance and in print, Kolkovich offers rich historical, literary, and social contexts for understanding a fascinating and under-read genre. Scholars have long recognized estate entertainments as occasions for news, gossip, and political self-promotion: hosts could air propaganda and make covert bids for advancement through the guise of extravagant praise for the sovereign. Kolkovich demonstrates, however, that these assemblages can be understood as more politically and culturally complex when considered in situ, whether in the setting of particular estates or as printed forms circulating in various book markets. She situates this genre as part of an emerging national literature that negotiated the boundaries of overlapping communities (region and nation) and the relative power afforded to monarch and competing authorities (including the host and the pageant ‘devisers’). By insisting on the crucial ‘locatedness’ of these negotiations as they materialized in performances and as circulating artifacts, Elizabethan Country House Entertainment succeeds in making a case for the significance and scope of a genre that almost defies categorization. After reading this book, the reader can immediately grasp the productive instability of these entertainments: as ephemeral performances that have to be reconstructed from partial and scattered evidence; as mutable book objects subject to multiple","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125270712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations by Simone Chess (review)","authors":"J. Panek","doi":"10.4324/9781315668352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315668352","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127719943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
E.K. Chambers’s famous, four-volume study of The Elizabethan Stage is one of the books that has shaped our received wisdom concerning early modern drama as a set of institutions and practices. But for scholars of my generation — and especially for those, like me, who write about plays but are not primarily historians of theatre — its precise shaping influence upon disciplinary commonsense may no longer be obvious. I read Chambers in graduate school, and have subsequently consulted him on occasion, but I would not be able to produce off the top of my head a list of the things I think I know about Elizabethan drama that originated with The Elizabethan Stage. One of the great pleasures of W.R. Streitberger’s meticulously researched historical study of the Elizabethan masters of the revels is that it simultaneously makes aspects of our field’s debt to Chambers visible and subjects many of the verities received from him to rigorous, revisionary scrutiny. In particular, as Streitberger shows, Chambers’s understanding of the role of the revels office and its relationship to the flourishing of commercial theatre in Elizabethan London was distorted by a teleological idea of social evolution in which ‘the mimetic instinct, deep rooted in the psychology of the folk’ finds its way, with a nudge from a centralizing and bureaucratizing Tudor court, towards its ‘ultimate entrenchment of economic independence’.1 The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre offers, instead, a history of the Elizabethan Revels Office and its relation to commercial drama based upon an idea of the court as a dynamic institutional amalgam that develops in an ad hoc manner to cope with changing circumstances: the office of the master of the revels, which had been created as part the Henrician privy chamber, had to be reimagined under Elizabeth, whose privy chamber of course was staffed by women. Never a sinecure, the mastership of the revels thereafter required managerial and dramaturgical abilities as well as the savoir faire, elite social status, and patronage connections that would previously have been automatic for a gentleman of the privy chamber under Henry VIII. So, Streitberger argues, Edmund Tilney was chosen for the mastership in 1578 over Thomas Blagrave (a key figure in the mid-Elizabethan reorganization of the revels office, and one who had been who had been producing the revels with the earl of Sussex since 1573) because
{"title":"The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I's Court Theatre by W. R. Streitberger (review)","authors":"C. Perry","doi":"10.1353/mlr.2017.0071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mlr.2017.0071","url":null,"abstract":"E.K. Chambers’s famous, four-volume study of The Elizabethan Stage is one of the books that has shaped our received wisdom concerning early modern drama as a set of institutions and practices. But for scholars of my generation — and especially for those, like me, who write about plays but are not primarily historians of theatre — its precise shaping influence upon disciplinary commonsense may no longer be obvious. I read Chambers in graduate school, and have subsequently consulted him on occasion, but I would not be able to produce off the top of my head a list of the things I think I know about Elizabethan drama that originated with The Elizabethan Stage. One of the great pleasures of W.R. Streitberger’s meticulously researched historical study of the Elizabethan masters of the revels is that it simultaneously makes aspects of our field’s debt to Chambers visible and subjects many of the verities received from him to rigorous, revisionary scrutiny. In particular, as Streitberger shows, Chambers’s understanding of the role of the revels office and its relationship to the flourishing of commercial theatre in Elizabethan London was distorted by a teleological idea of social evolution in which ‘the mimetic instinct, deep rooted in the psychology of the folk’ finds its way, with a nudge from a centralizing and bureaucratizing Tudor court, towards its ‘ultimate entrenchment of economic independence’.1 The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth I’s Court Theatre offers, instead, a history of the Elizabethan Revels Office and its relation to commercial drama based upon an idea of the court as a dynamic institutional amalgam that develops in an ad hoc manner to cope with changing circumstances: the office of the master of the revels, which had been created as part the Henrician privy chamber, had to be reimagined under Elizabeth, whose privy chamber of course was staffed by women. Never a sinecure, the mastership of the revels thereafter required managerial and dramaturgical abilities as well as the savoir faire, elite social status, and patronage connections that would previously have been automatic for a gentleman of the privy chamber under Henry VIII. So, Streitberger argues, Edmund Tilney was chosen for the mastership in 1578 over Thomas Blagrave (a key figure in the mid-Elizabethan reorganization of the revels office, and one who had been who had been producing the revels with the earl of Sussex since 1573) because","PeriodicalId":422756,"journal":{"name":"Early Theatre: A Journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129715421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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