Explores a native English theater genre that flourished during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and portrayed domestic conflict among English characters of the middle ranks of society. At a time when the conventional family was seen as the foundation of social order, the plays stressed the contradictions and struggles attending marriage and the patriarchal family. Canadian card order number: C96-931485-X. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Mental and Cultural World of Tudor and Stuart England)

Literature & Fiction

Comensoli, Viviana

History & Criticism

Univ of Toronto Pr

Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (Theory/Culture)

Over the last two decades there has been a perceived paradigm shift in the study of English Renaissance literature. Scholarly attention has moved from the individual to the social as the agent of literary production and the principal site of discussion. Genius is now far less likely to be invoked than discourse, culture, and ideology. The intellectual shift, routinely associated both with new historicism and cultural materialism, has been neither uncontested nor simple and uniform. The essays in the present volume set out to identify, examine, and respond to these discontinuities , and in so doing attest to the extraordinary vitality of contemporary Renaissance studies.

Stevens, Paul

British & Irish

The domestic play flourished on the English popular stage during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its roots were predominantly native, rather than classical, and its mainspring was the staging of domestic conflict amongst English characters from the middle ranks of society. 'Household Business' traces the genre's origins in the cycle plays of medieval England and examines its aesthetic configurations in relation to extra-literary discourses and practices that underwrote Renaissance ideologies of private life. At a time when the orthodox view of the family defined it as the foundation of the social order, a number of domestic dramas took a more critical perspective, stressing the contradictions and struggles that attend marriage and the patriarchal family. In addition to well-known domestic dramas as A Woman Killed with Kindness, Arden of Feversham, The Witch of Edmonton, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, Viviana Comensoli analyzes less well-studied plays as A Warning for Fair Women, Two Lamentable Tragedies, and The Late Lancashire Witches. The book also provides an extensive and timely assessment of domestic comedy, demonstrating how plays such as The London Prodigal, The Fair Maid of Bristow, andThe Honest Whore (Parts I and II) resist homiletic paradigms in favour of a more dialectical dramaturgy.

'Household Business': Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Heritage)

Dramas & Plays

University of Toronto Press

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