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Stage-Wrights : Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value / Paul Yachnin.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: New Cultural StudiesPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2015]Copyright date: ©1997Description: 1 online resource (232 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812233957
  • 9781512809398
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 822/.309 21
LOC classification:
  • PR658.S46
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
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
Summary: 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.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781512809398

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 online access with authorization star

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.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)