David McInnis

"Shakespeare and Lost Plays returns Shakespeare's dramatic work to its most immediate and (arguably) pivotal context; by situating it alongside the hundreds of plays known to Shakespeare's original audiences, but lost to us. David McInnis reassesses the value of lost plays in relation to both the companies that originally performed them, and to contemporary scholars of early modern drama. This innovative study revisits key moments in Shakespeare's career and the development of his company and, by prioritising the immense volume of information we now possess about lost plays, provides a richer, more accurate picture of dramatic activity than has hitherto been possible. By considering a variety of ways to grapple with the problem of lost, imperceptible, or ignored texts, this volume presents a methodology for working with lacunae in archival evidence and the distorting effect of Shakespeare-centric narratives, thus reinterpreting our perception of the field of early modern drama"--

Reimagining Drama in Early Modern England

Shakespeare and Lost Plays

Claire Jowitt

Offers new ways to conceptualize the relationship between early modern travel and drama, and re-assesses how travel drama is defined.

The Journeying Play

Travel and Drama in Early Modern England

This agenda-setting volume on travel and drama in early modern England provides new insights into Renaissance stage practice, performance history, and theatre's transnational exchanges. It advances our understanding of theatre history, drama's generic conventions, and what constitutes plays about travel at a time when the professional theatre was rapidly developing and England was attempting to announce its presence within a global economy. Recent critical studies have shown that the reach of early modern travel was global in scope, and its cultural consequences more important than narratives that are dominated by the Atlantic world suggest. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars redefines the field by expanding the canon of recognized plays concerned with travel. Re-assessing the parameters of the genre, the chapters offer fresh perspectives on how these plays communicated with their audiences and readers.

Lisa Hopkins

Andrew Hiscock

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the plays' critical and performance history A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online The blockbuster Tamburlaine plays (1587) instantly established Marlowe's reputation for experimenting with subversive, outrageous and immoral material. The plays follow the meteoric rise of a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord, whose conquests of eastern emperors soon sees him established as the most powerful man in the world. The visual tableaux featured in the plays are iconic. He uses his enemy Bajazeth as a footstool, and has other emperors pull his chariot like horses. He burns the Qur'an on stage. The plays were memorable, too, for how they sounded: they showcased the power and variability of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare would go on to perfect. No history of Shakespeare's theatre is complete without understanding the influence and significance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays. Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader offers the definitive introduction to these plays and new perspectives on these seminal works. It provides an overview of their reception on stage and by critics, and offers fresh insights into the teaching of these plays in the classroom.

Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader

Eric Parisot

Jessica Wilkinson

Robert Graves tells us that “the poet’s first enrichment is a knowledge and understanding of myths.” Certainly, as this collection of essays, poems and visual images affirms, mythology has been a field richly mined by poets and artists from antiquity through to the present day. It is testament to both the enduring power of myth, as well as the adaptability of its form, that poets and writers continually turn to the mythic for both inspiration and guidance. This volume presents a diverse collection of analytical and creative works by scholars, poets and visual artists, in response to their varied explorations of the prolific dialogue that exists between myth and poetry.

Poetic Transformations and Metamorphoses

Refashioning Myth

Matthew Steggle

Roslyn L. Knutson

As early modernists with an interest in the literary culture of Shakespeare’s time, we work in a field that contains many significant losses: of texts, of contextual information, of other forms of cultural activity. No account of early modern literary culture is complete without acknowledgment of these lacunae, and although lost drama has become a topic of increasing interest in Shakespeare studies, it is important to recognize that loss is not restricted to play-texts alone. Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time broadens the scope of the scholarly conversation about loss beyond drama and beyond London. It aims to develop further models and techniques for thinking about lost plays, but also of other kinds of lost early modern works, and even lost persons associated with literary and theatrical circles. Chapters examine textual corruption, oral preservation, quantitative analysis, translation, and experiments in “verbatim theater”, plus much more.

Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time

Explores Shakespeare's plays in their most immediate context: the hundreds of plays known to original audiences, but lost to us.

David McInnis

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