Stage-Wrights : Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value /
Yachnin, Paul
Stage-Wrights : Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value / Paul Yachnin. - 1 online resource (232 p.) - New Cultural Studies .
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Textual Note and Abbreviations -- Preface -- 1. The Powerless Theater -- 2. Desdemona's Voice: Historical Interpretation and the Operations of Minds -- 3. The Knowledge Marketplace -- 4. Instituting Mirth in Renaissance Comedy -- 5. Reflections of Theater in the "Tragic Glass" from 93 Marlowe to Middleton -- 6. "Gargantua's Mouth": Orality, Voice, and the 129 Gender of Theatrical Power -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec
To many of their contemporaries, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were little more than artisanal craftsmen, "stage-wrights" who wrote plays for money, to be performed in common playhouses and in a manner often antithetical to what Jonson himself viewed as the higher calling of poetry. In response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism, Paul Yachnin contends, players and dramatists alike had promulgated the idea of drama's irrelevance, creating a recreational theater that failed to influence its audience in any purposeful way.In Stage-Wrights Yachnin shows how Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton struggled to reclaim not only the importance of their art, but their own social legitimacy as well as through the reshaping of the commercial theater. His bold readings of their works unveil the strategies by which they sought power from their privileged but powerless position on the margins. Adopting a hermeneutical approach, he explores a wide range of historical evidence to describe how English Renaissance drama depicted the world in ways refracted by the interests of the playing companies; throughout, he challenges recent historicist models that have overrated the importance of dramatic productions to society and its institutions of authority.Paul Yachnin offers a new way of understanding dramatic texts in relation to their social history. In showing how the efforts of three playwrights helped shape the area of discourse we now call "the literary," Stage-Wrights represents both a major rereading of the place of theater in Shakespeare's London and an important clarification of the social context of contemporary criticism.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
In English.
9780812233957 9781512809398
10.9783/9781512809398 doi
English drama--History and criticism.--17th century
English drama--History and criticism.--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600
Theater and society--History--England--16th century.
Theater and society--History--England--17th century.
Cultural Studies.
Literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM / Shakespeare.
PR658.S46
822/.309
Stage-Wrights : Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value / Paul Yachnin. - 1 online resource (232 p.) - New Cultural Studies .
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Textual Note and Abbreviations -- Preface -- 1. The Powerless Theater -- 2. Desdemona's Voice: Historical Interpretation and the Operations of Minds -- 3. The Knowledge Marketplace -- 4. Instituting Mirth in Renaissance Comedy -- 5. Reflections of Theater in the "Tragic Glass" from 93 Marlowe to Middleton -- 6. "Gargantua's Mouth": Orality, Voice, and the 129 Gender of Theatrical Power -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
restricted access http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec
To many of their contemporaries, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were little more than artisanal craftsmen, "stage-wrights" who wrote plays for money, to be performed in common playhouses and in a manner often antithetical to what Jonson himself viewed as the higher calling of poetry. In response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism, Paul Yachnin contends, players and dramatists alike had promulgated the idea of drama's irrelevance, creating a recreational theater that failed to influence its audience in any purposeful way.In Stage-Wrights Yachnin shows how Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton struggled to reclaim not only the importance of their art, but their own social legitimacy as well as through the reshaping of the commercial theater. His bold readings of their works unveil the strategies by which they sought power from their privileged but powerless position on the margins. Adopting a hermeneutical approach, he explores a wide range of historical evidence to describe how English Renaissance drama depicted the world in ways refracted by the interests of the playing companies; throughout, he challenges recent historicist models that have overrated the importance of dramatic productions to society and its institutions of authority.Paul Yachnin offers a new way of understanding dramatic texts in relation to their social history. In showing how the efforts of three playwrights helped shape the area of discourse we now call "the literary," Stage-Wrights represents both a major rereading of the place of theater in Shakespeare's London and an important clarification of the social context of contemporary criticism.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
In English.
9780812233957 9781512809398
10.9783/9781512809398 doi
English drama--History and criticism.--17th century
English drama--History and criticism.--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600
Theater and society--History--England--16th century.
Theater and society--History--England--17th century.
Cultural Studies.
Literature.
LITERARY CRITICISM / Shakespeare.
PR658.S46
822/.309