Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England articles from January 1 2006

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England archives from January 1 2006

Marlowe, company ownership, and the role of Edward II.
January 1, 2006... THE company ownership of most of Marlowe's plays, most of the time, is not a problem for theater historians. The problem lies a bit deeper. We know, for example, that the Admiral's Men owned the two Tamburlaine plays because of the title-page...

Edward Alleyn, the new model actor, and the rise of the celebrity in the 1590s.
January 1, 2006... Introduction IT has become commonplace to speak of the 1590s as a time when the capitalist playhouse had become a relatively stable economic institution. To be sure, the period between 1590 and 1600 was an auspicious decade, not only for...

Building playhouses, the accession of James I, and the Red Bull.
January 1, 2006... FOUR hundred years after the event seems a convenient time to ask whether the accession of James I on March 24, 1603, affected the schemes of people who built (or, more accurately, caused to be built) the professional London playhouses that...

"Honesty and vulgar praise": the Poet's War and the literary field.
January 1, 2006... IN works such as Distinction, The Field of Cultural Production, and The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu argues that the determination of the value of an artwork is structured by a series of paired oppositions--high, low; avant-garde, bourgeois;...

"Speaking some words, but of no importance"? Stage directions, Thomas Heywood, and Edward IV.
January 1, 2006... IN 1635, approaching the end of a career in the theater that had already spanned more than forty years, Thomas Heywood interrupted the bizarre concoction of folklore and spiritual wisdom he called The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells to...

"Maluolio within": acting on the threshold between onstage and offstage spaces.
January 1, 2006... IN his article, "Malvolio and the Dark House," John H. Astington deals with problems of staging Malvolio's imprisonment in Twelfth Night, 4.2. (1) The F1 text, which is the sole authority for the play, places the stage direction "Maluolio...

The Protestant context of George Peele's "pleasant conceited" Old Wives Tale.
January 1, 2006... THE first eight decades of scholarship on The Old Wives Tale left us with a play that is a naive and pleasant conceited comedy, or a satire of romantic comedies, or a flawed representation of the language, methods, and ethos of folk literature....

"Veniance, Lord, apon thaym fall": maternal mourning, divine justice, and tragedy in the Corpus Christi plays.
January 1, 2006... SCHOLARS have long recognized that medieval concepts of reciprocal justice and divine retribution underpin the dramatic patterns of the Herod plays. (1) However, they have overlooked the evidence suggesting that this ethical design is embodied...

"To passe the see in shortt space": mapping the world in the Digby Mary Magdalen.
January 1, 2006... THE world as seen from medieval England was largely a spiritual construct. The only sense of distant lands commonly available was derived from pilgrimage accounts and from the occasional world map seen on public display in a cathedral or Bible....

England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... England's Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy, by Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 348. Cloth $29.95; paper $19.95. England's Elizabeth is an encyclopedic cultural history,...

The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, by Jack Lynch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp xi + 224. Cloth $55.00 In his recent book, Jack Lynch elegantly performs a useful service. The way Johnson's age perceived the...

Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England.
January 1, 2006... Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England, by Pamela Allen Brown. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 263. Cloth $ 49.95. Paper $ 19.95. It is a truth universally...

Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, by Jennifer A. Low. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xvii + 238. Hardcover $59.95. In one of the most outspoken of her Sociable Letters (1664), Margaret Cavendish...

Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance. By Michael Mangan. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Pp. xi + 276. Cloth $75.00 Paper $24.95 Although the title of Michael Mangan's Staging Masculinities: History,...

The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, edited by Naomi Conn Liebler. London and New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. X + 242. Cloth $65.00. "Female" and "tragic hero": together in the same space? The seeming oxymoron buried beneath...

Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe.
January 1, 2006... Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, by William N. West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 293. Cloth $65.00. Most readers will open this volume, I suspect, with some version of the question I brought to...

The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama, by Nora Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 206. Cloth $60.00. In productive dialogue with recent work on theatrical collaboration, on early modern figurations of...

Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama, by Jeremy Lopez. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 239. Cloth $60.00. This book has many virtues. Jeremy Lopez is a shrewd reader of plays with a keen...

Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, by W. B. Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 274. Cloth $58.00, paper $21.00. For the past two decades W. B. Worthen has been the leading theorist of the...

Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Shakespeare in Print. A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, by Andrew Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 503. Cloth $75.00. One of the editors brought in by John Dover Wilson to help complete the...

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Lukas Erne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 287. Cloth $60.00. Lukas Erne's book seeks to challenge certain fundamental assumptions about Renaissance (and, specifically, Shakespeare)...

Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Beyond The Spanish Tragedy: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd, by Lukas Erne. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001, Pp. xix + 252. Cloth $74.95. Without risking overstatement, we can say with reasonable certainty...

Shakespeare and Violence.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Shakespeare and Violence, by R. A. Foakes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xiii, 224 pp.. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.99. By many accounts (including that of this reviewer), R. A. Foakes, although nominally retired, remains one...

Shakespeare: Three Problem Plays.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Shakespeare: Three Problem Plays by Nicholas Marsh. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Pp. x-280. Cloth $60.00; Paper $18.95. The first question that comes to mind while reading Nicolas Marsh's new book Shakespeare: Three Problem Plays, is who is...

Shakespeare Survey 55.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Shakespeare Survey 55, ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 410 pp. Cloth $80.00. The theme of Shakespeare Survey 55 is "King Lear and Its Afterlife," although it includes half a dozen essays on other...

Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the New York Corpus Christi Plays.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the New York Corpus Christi Plays, by Sarah Beckwith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 294. Cloth $35.00; Paper $22.50. For the summer feast of Corpus Christi, York...

This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages, by Michal Kobialka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp.viii + 313. Cloth $60.00, paper $27.95. In the last few years, scholars have greatly enriched and...

Foreword.
January 1, 2006... The publication of volume 19 of Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England addresses the ongoing interest in attribution studies with two essays that concentrate on the dramatist John Webster. First, Mac Jackson takes up the issue of the...

John Webster, James Shirley, and the Melbourne manuscript.(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... I IN 1986 there was discovered in the muniments room at Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire, the manuscript fragment of a play apparently written during the early decades of the seventeenth century. A single sheet of paper, folded once, contains...

John Webster's handbook of model letters: a study in attribution.(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... Introduction IN 1625 "I. W. Gent." issued a collection of letters, most with replies attached, designed both to amuse readers and to instruct them in the art of personal correspondence. This slim volume of fifty-nine pages, printed in...

The Bell Savage inn and playhouse in London.(Renaissance theaters)
January 1, 2006... FOUR London inns were also playhouses in Shakespearean times, and notable theatrical events occurred in all of them. All four together, however, are less well known than any of the nineteen other Shakespearean playhouses. Unsurprisingly, they...

Class categorization, capitalism, and the problem of "gentle" identity in The Royall King and the Loyall Subject and Eastward Ho!(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... 1 THOMAS Heywood's often strangely named, definitely oddly plotted plays clearly call attention to themselves, but often because they seem so generically uncontainable. Yet whether we call some of them romances, others history plays, and...

Marlowe's staging of meaning.
January 1, 2006... IN his preface to the collection "A Poet and a filthy Play-maker" Kenneth Friedenreich remarks that for a long time criticism of Marlowe's plays focused on his abilities as a poet rather than as a playwright, and that not until the late...

Foreword.
January 1, 2006... Volume 18 of Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England reflects a wide variety of scholarly interests. These are presented in essays addressing the conditions of theatrical ownership and dramatic competition to those exploring stage movement...

"My little what shall I call thee": reinventing the rape tragedy in William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust.(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... IN William Rowley's tragedy All's Lost by Lust (c.1618-20), Jacinta, a Spanish noblewoman in the court of King Roderick, acquires an unacceptable social position through no fault of her own. Left alone in the castle while her father leads an...

Merchants of Venice in a Knack to Know an Honest Man.(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... THE anonymous comedy A Knack to Know an Honest Man seems to have been popular with audiences in 1590s London: Philip Henslowe records twenty-one performances at the Rose Theatre between 22 October 1594 and 3 November 1596, and when the play was...

The victim of fashion? Rereading the biography of John Lyly.(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... We have looked at Lyly's Euphues and his plays as literary experiences worthy of comment in their own right. They may be seen, however, from another angle--as part of a tide of fashion which swept them up, sustained them for a...

The "extremities" of sumptuary law in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... NEAR the conclusion of Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Miles, the play's clownish student, is dismissed from Friar Bacon's service and tutelage for failing to rouse his master at the brief awakening of Bacon's necromantic...

Malvolio's yellow stockings: coding illicit sexuality in early modern London.(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... In her survey of the symbolism of yellow for apparel in early modern England, M. Channing Linthicum argues that "Certainly, yellow was not limited to the costume of one type or condition of person" ("Malvolio," 93). So too, stockings in this...

John Marston's Entertainment at Ashby and the 1606 Fleet Conduit Eclogue.(essay)(Critical essay)
January 1, 2006... ON 31 July 1606, a short "eclogue" was performed at the Fleet Conduit in London, as one of a number of events staged by the City of London to celebrate the visit that day of King James and of his brother-in-law King Christian VI of Denmark. In...

Shakespeare, Crypto-Catholicism, Crypto-criticism.(Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and Patronage)(Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion and Patronage, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 258. Cloth $74.95; Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian...

Shakespeare and the French Poet.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Shakespeare and the French Poet, by Yves Bonnefoy, edited by John Naughton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xix + 283. Paper $22.50. As the carefully chosen title suggests, this book is more than a study of Shakespeare. It...

Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain, by Ros King. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xiv + 197. Cloth $89.95. Shakespeare's Cymbeline, because of its complexities of plot and language, poses difficulties for both critics and theater companies....

Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain, by Andrew Hadfield. Basing-stoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. viii + 220. Cloth $65.00. Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain insists that English Renaissance...

English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, by Mary Floyd-Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 256. Cloth $65.00. Cued by Gail Kern Paster's success in her book The Body Embarrassed in reading early modern...

The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720, by Gerald MacLean. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. xxi + 267. Cloth $59.95. There is an element of theatricality inherent in MacLean's...

Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions, by Stephen Orgel. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: 2003. Pp. xvi + 172. Cloth $26.95. A kind of decorated annex to his recent study, The Authentic Shakespeare, this...

Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, by Dermot Cavanagh. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Pp. x + 197. Cloth, $65.00. Dermot Cavanagh pursues two announced projects in Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History...

Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England, by Bryan Reynolds. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 217. Cloth $43.00. Defending the way he deploys evidence of...

Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture, by Carol Thomas Neely. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. xv + 244. Cloth $52.50; paper $21.95. A number of years ago, a play that earned...

Subjects to the King's Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Subjects to the King's Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England, by Olga Valbuena. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Pp. xxxi + 274. Cloth $39.95. Marriage, with its irresistible metaphors and...

Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds.(Voyage Drama and Gender Politics: Real and Imagined Worlds, 1589-1642)(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642: Real and Imagined Worlds, by Claire Jowitt. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 240. Cloth $79.95. Claire Jowitt's monograph, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics,...

Privacy, Playreading and Early Modern Women's Closet Drama.
January 1, 2006... Privacy, Playreading and Early Modern Women's Closet Drama, by Marta Straznicky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xii + 182. Cloth $75.00. The title of Marta Straznicky's book is wittily deceptive: like the plays it...

Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England.(Book review)
January 1, 2006... Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England, by Theresa Coletti. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 342. Cloth $59.95. Although Mary...