Imagining Spectatorship: From the Mysteries to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford Textual Perspectives)

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.Imagining Spectatorship offers a new discussion of how spectators witnessed early drama in the various spaces and places in which those works were performed. It combines broad historical and theoretical reflection with closely analysed case studies to produce a comprehensive account of the ways in which individuals encountered early drama, how they were cued to respond to it, and how we might think about those issues today.It addresses the practical matters that conditioned spectatorship, principally those concerned with the location and configuration of the spaces in which a performance occurred, but also suggests how these factors intersected with social status, gender, religious commitment and affiliation, degrees of real or felt personal agency, and the operation of the cognitive processes themselves. It considers both real witnesses and those "imagined" spectators which are seemingly figured by both dramatic and quasi-dramatic works, and whose assumed attitudes play-makers sought to second-guess. It also looks at the spectatorial experience itself as a subject of representation in a number of early texts. Finally, it examines the complex contract entered into by audiences and players for the duration of a performance, looking at how texts cued spectators to respond to specific dramaturgical tropes and gambits and how audience response was itself a cause of potential anxiety for writers.The book resists the conventional divide between "medieval" and "early modern" drama, using its focus on the spectators' experience to point connections and continuities across a diverse range of genres, such as processions and tourneys as well as scripted plays, pageants, and interludes; a variety of different venues, such as city streets, great halls, and playhouses, and a period of about 150 years to the Shakespearean stage of the 1590s and 1600s. It seeks to offer routes by which inferences about early spectatorship can be made despite the relative absence of personal testimony from the period.

Literature & Fiction

Walker, Greg

McGavin, John J.

Dramas & Plays

Oxford University Press

The first comprehensive scholarly biography of the Tudor playwright, poet, musician, singer, proverb-collector, and satirist John Heywood offers both a timely investigation of the career of one of early-Tudor England's most fascinating and significant artists and a revealing case study of the pressures and possibilities of literary and artistic creativity in a time of religious and political persecution.

John Heywood: Comedy and Survival in Tudor England

British & Irish

Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation

Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation spans the boundaries between literary studies and history. It looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance. It shows the profound effects that political oppression had on the literary production of the years from 1528 to 1547, and how English writers in turn strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist that oppression. The result was the destruction of a number of forms that had dominated the literary production of late-medieval England, but also the creation of new forms that were to dominate the writing of the following centuries. Paradoxically, the tyranny of Henry VIII gave birth to many modes of writing now seen to be characteristic of the English literary Renaissance.

Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation

Writing Under Tyranny spans the boundaries between literary studies and history. It looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance. It shows the profound effects that political oppression had on the literary production of the years from 1528 to 1547, and how English writers in turn strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist that oppression. The result was the destruction of a number of forms that had dominated the literary production of late-medieval England, but also the creation of new forms that were to dominate the writing of the following centuries. Paradoxically, the tyranny of Henry VIII gave birth to many modes of writing now seen to be characteristic of the English literary Renaissance.

Pepe (Mount Gravatt Reading Series)

Jim Robins

Huxley, Ed

Addison Wesley Higher Education (a Pearson Education company)

Skelton is probably the greatest unknown poet of English literature. The outspoken tutor of the future Henry VIII, Skelton was an idiosyncratic genius whose poetry defies rules and boundaries. Founded in 1906 by J.M. Dent, the Everyman Library has always tried to make the best books ever written available to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible price. Unique editorial features that help Everyman Paperback Classics stand out from the crowd include: a leading scholar or literary critic's introduction to the text, a biography of the author, a chronology of her or his life and times, a historical selection of criticism, and a concise plot summary. Each Everyman title offers these extensive materials at a price that competes with the most inexpensive editions on the market-but Everyman Paperbacks have durable binding, quality paper, and the highest editorial and scholarly standards.

John Skelton (Everyman Poetry Library)

Poetry

Everyman

Springblade #5: Border Massacre

Jove

Springblade #6/battle

Springblade #7/sentin

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Books by Walker, Greg