Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater focuses on political, social, and aesthetic issues to reveal the enormous influence of civic celebration on Renaissance theater. Ranging across Shakespeare's canon and including the work of his fellow playwrights, this collection of twelve essays considers tournaments, royal entries, Lord Mayor's Shows, funeral processions progress entertainments, court masques, and more.

Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins>

In Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, leading international Shakespeare scholars provide a contextually informed approach to Shakespeare's last seven plays.

Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An afterword, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.

This collection of commissioned essays by established scholars, responds to critical debate on political theatre of the turbulent early years of the seventeenth century. Theatre is widely interpreted. The authors discuss censorship, the social implications of pageantry, Reformation ideals, popular theatre and the politics of the masque throughout the period. An early chapter discusses political theatre in the light of work by revisionist and post-revisionist historians. The drama of Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, Massinger, Chapman, Heywood and Rowley is given detailed attention, while Shakespeare's plays are considered in the introductory chapter.

Shakespeare and the Poet's Life explores a central biographical question: why did Shakespeare choose to cease writing sonnets and court-focused long poems like The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis and continue writing plays? Author Gary Schmidgall persuasively demonstrates the value of contemplating the professional reasons Shakespeare -- or any poet of the time -- ceased being an Elizabethan court poet and focused his efforts on drama and the Globe. Students of Shakespeare and of Renaissance poetry will find Schmidgall's approach and conclusions both challenging and illuminating.

This interdisciplinary study theorizes the interaction of individual performance and social space. Examining three categories of space – the urban, the theatrical, and the cartographic – this volume considers the role of performance in the production and operation of these spaces during a period in London’s history defined roughly by the life of Shakespeare. City/Stage/Globe not only organizes a selection of plays, pageants, maps, and masques in the historical and cultural contexts in which they emerged, but also uses performance theory to locate the ways in which these seemingly ephemeral events contributed to lasting change in the spatial concepts and physical topograpy of early modern London.

A book about Jacobean civic pageants.

English royal funeral ceremony from Mary, Queen of Scots to James I gives fascinating insight into the relationship between power and ritual at the renaissance court.

This book explores historical, socio-political, and metatheatrical readings of a whole host of dying bodies and risen corpses, each part of a long tradition of living death on stage. Just as zombies, ghouls, and the undead in modern media often stand in for present-day concerns, early modern writers frequently imagined living death in complex ways that allowed them to address contemporary anxieties. These include fresh bleeding bodies (and body parts), ghostly Lord Mayors, and dying characters who must carefully choose their last words – or have those words chosen for them by the living. As well as offering fresh interpretations of well-known plays such as Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy and Webster’s The White Devil, this innovative study also sheds light on less well-known works such as the anonymous The Tragedy of Locrine, Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and Munday’s mayoral pageants Chruso-thriambos and Chrysanaleia. The author demonstrates that wherever characters in early modern drama appear to straddle the line between this world and the next, it is rarely a simple matter of life and death. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in theatre and performance studies, and cultural and social studies.