This title, first published in 1988, examines the influence of the Jacobean masque on the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. The author examines the ways in which the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher represent not only a great expression of human emotion, but how they are also a fine example of the growth and change of dramatic form. This title will be of interest to students of drama, literature and performance studies.

This title, first published in 1988, examines the influence of the Jacobean masque on the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. The author examines the ways in which the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher represent not only a great expression of human emotion, but how they are also a fine example of the growth and change of dramatic form. This title will be of interest to students of drama, literature and performance studies.

The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly staged plays-within and other metatheatrical inserts. Such works present fictionalized spectators as well as performers, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of the interpretive work of a spectator as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about early modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. This study examines on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Philip Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Each play presents a different form of metatheatrical inset, from the plays-within of The Roman Actor (1626), to the masques-within of The City Madam (1632) to the titular miniature portrait of The Picture (1629), moving thematically from spectator interpretations of dramatic performance, the visual spectacle of the masque to staged 'readings' of static visual art. All three forms present a dramatization of the process of examination, and allow an analysis of Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

This is an analysis of sexual themes in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, both in the context of the Jacobean theatre and in the light of modern readings of sexuality and gender during the English Renaissance. Sandra Clark challenges commonly-held perceptions of Beaumont and Fletcher's work. The book is intended for undergraduate and graduate courses on Renaissance literature, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, tragicomedy, gender and genre in the Renaissance.

This book provides an insight to the cultural work involved in violence at sea in this period of maritime history. It is the first to consider how 'piracy' and representations of 'pirates' both shape and were shaped by political, social and religious debates, showing how attitudes to 'piracy' and violence at sea were debated between 1550 and 1650.

A 1998 collection which takes an alternative look at the courtly masque in early seventeenth-century England.

Massinger’s Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger offers the first book-length account of the pervasive influence of Italian culture on the canon of Philip Massinger, one of the most successful playwrights of the post-Shakespearean period. This volume explores the relationships between Massinger and Italian literary, dramatic and intellectual culture in the larger context of Anglo-Italian cultural exchanges. The book investigates the influence of Italian culture, considering Massinger’s engagement and appropriation of Italian texts, dramatic and political theories and ideas related to the country and his use of Italy as a setting. Massinger’s Italy offers a fresh and unexpected perspective on the development of Anglo-Italian discourse on the early modern English stage, showing to what extent Massinger contributed to the myth of Italy and to the circulation of Italian culture and shedding light on the complex system of Anglo-Italian interconnections within the corpus of Massinger’s plays as well as with the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This book is a study of the Chamberlain's/King's Men as a business. It investigates the economic workings of the company: the conditions under which they operated, their expenses and income, and the ways in which they adopted to fit changing circumstances. Each chapter focuses on a different moment in the company's history, and consists of economic readings, exploring texts by Shakespeare and other authors through an economic lens, as the property of the company and through the circumstances in which they were written.

In this study of Shakespeare's visual culture Frederick Kiefer looks at the personified characters created by Shakespeare in his plays, his walking, talking abstractions. These include Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Time in The Winter's Tale, Spring and Winter in Love's Labour's Lost, Revenge in Titus Andronicus, and the deities in the late plays. All these personae take physical form on the stage: the actors performing the roles wear distinctive attire and carry appropriate props. The book seeks to reconstruct the appearance of Shakespeare's personified characters; to explain the symbolism of their costumes and props; and to assess the significance of these symbolic characters for the plays in which they appear. To accomplish this reconstruction, Kiefer brings together a wealth of visual and literary evidence including engravings, woodcuts, paintings, drawings, tapestries, emblems, civic pageants, masques, poetry and plays. The book contains over forty illustrations of personified characters in Shakespeare's time.