Presents examples of folk drama, and morality plays, and the early tragedies and comedies following classical models

This is a thoroughly revised edition of Glynne Wickham's important history of the development of dramatic art in Christian Europe. Professor Wickham surveys the foundations on which this dramatic art was built: the architecture, costumes and ceremonial of the imperial court at Byzantium, the liturgies of countires in the Eastern and Western Empires and the triumph of the Roman rite and the Romanesque style in Western art. Within this context Professor Wickham describes three major influences upon the drama: religion, recreation and commerce. The first produced the liturgical music drama rooted in praise of Christ the King, vernacular Corpus Christi drama, Saint Plays and Moralities centred on the humanity of Christ. The second gave rise to the secular theatres of social recreation based on the games and dances of village communities ad the more sophisticated sex and war games of the nobility. The section on commerce shows how the development of the drama was intimately related to questions of funding and management which led, during the sixteenth century, to the substitution of a professional for an amateur theatre, and to a growing emphasis on stage spectacle. For this third edition the author has added a substantial section on monastic reform and its effect on Biblical translation and the use of allegory; a final chapter charts the transition in different European countries from this medieval Gothic theatre to the neoclassical methods of play construction and representation which flourished for the next two hundred years. The book gorges a coherent pattern through a very large and complicated subject. It is an excellent introduction to medieval theatre for undergraduates and to the growing number of theatregoers who enjoy contemporary revivals of medieval plays. A large plate section gives a pictorial version of the story, using photographs of contemporary manuscript illuminations, mosaics, frescoes, paintings and sculptures.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.

The standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States since the beginning of the 20th century, Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections has undergone seven previous editions, the latest in 1988, covering 1900 through 1985. In this new edition, Denise Montgomery has expanded the volume to include collections published in the entire English-speaking world through 2000 and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors. Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume is a valuable resource for libraries worldwide.

Newest research into drama and performance from the Middle Ages and the Tudor period. Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic religious plays, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. This volume offers new perspectives in three important areas. It opens with an investigation of the tantalising image of the Black Tudor trumpeter, John Blanke, in the Westminster Tournament Roll. Complementing the assessment of the documentary evidence for his employment in our last volume, it uncovers the surprising complexity of how Islamic dress was represented at the court of Henry VIII. Two essays engage with the challenging Croxton Play of the Sacrament, discussing very different issues of bodily integrity. The first revealingly brings together medieval and posthumanist theory, proposing how in performance the play can move to obliterate the distinction between Jewish and Christian bodies. The second considers the play in the light of modern disability theory, before examining the often contrasting evidence of lives lived, and performances informed, by actual disabled performers. The final contributions focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century performances of medieval material, and how it can be adapted for later times and sensibilities. Investigation of an almost unknown 1924 London performance of a fifteenth-century French nativity play reveals much about early twentieth-century views of medieval drama. Meanwhile, the 2023 coronation of King Charles III prompts an analysis of a spectacular ceremony balanced between asserting its medieval origins and demonstrating its modern relevance. Finally, a review of a story-telling performance assesses how the problematic material of The Seven Sages of Rome might be addressed to modern audiences and preoccupations.

At first glance A Guide to English Literature may seem to be no more than a short bibliography of English literature with perhaps rather more extensive--and certainly more outspoken--comments on the principal editions, commentaries, biographies, and critical works than bibliographies usually provide. But it is something more: this guide contains long "inter-chapters" that provide reinterpretations of the principal periods of English literature in the light of modern research, as well as two final sections summarizing in unusual detail the literary criticism that exists in English and recent scholarship in the field. The purpose of this book, then, is to provide the reader with convenient access to a disciplined study of the texts themselves. This guide proposes itself as a new kind of literary history. The conventional history of literature has often tended to become a substitute for the reading of the literature it describes: the better the history, the greater the temptation to substitute it. The present combination of reading lists and inter-chapters cannot be a substitute for anything else. Meaningless as literature in themselves, they nevertheless provide the necessary preliminary information to meaningful reading. Since oddities of arrangement derive from these assumptions, the authors are not arranged alphabetically. Instead there are chronological compartments--with the divisions circa 1500, 1650, and 1800--in which authors succeed each other in the order of their births. This pioneering handbook is primarily a bibliographical laborsaving device. It is meant mostly for students and the general reader in that it stops where original research by the reader is expected to begin. However, the last chapter on literary scholarship is devoted specifically to the research specialist and provides indispensable equipment for the reader. There is also a general section on literary criticism which will be of use to all. F.W. Bateson (1901-1978) was University Lecturer in English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi College. Founder and editor of the periodical Essays in Criticism, he is also editor of the four-volume Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and the author of a number of critical studies of English poetry and drama.