Medieval English Drama

Medieval English Drama
Author: Katie Normington
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2013-04-30
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 074565486X

Medieval English Drama provides a fresh introduction to the dramatic and festive practices of England in the late Middle Ages. The book places particular emphasis on the importance of the performance contexts of these events, bringing to life a period before permanent theatre buildings when performances took place in a wide variety of locations and had to fight to attract and maintain the attention of an audience. Showing the interplay between dramatic and everyday life, the book covers performances in convents, churches, parishes, street processions and parades, and in particular distinguishes between modes of outdoor and indoor performance. Katie Normington aids the reader to a fuller understanding of these early English dramatic practices by explaining the significance of the place of performance, the particularities of spectatorship for each event and how the conventions of the form of drama were manipulated to address its reception. Audiences considered range from cloistered members, congregations and parish members to urban citizens, nobles and royalty. Undergraduate students of literature of this period will find this an approachable and illuminating guide.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre
Author: Richard Beadle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2008-07-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139827928

The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition continues to provide an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters, including one on the cultural significance of early drama. A thoroughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.

Medieval Drama

Medieval Drama
Author: Greg Walker
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
Total Pages: 630
Release: 2000-10-03
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780631217275

This anthology of drama in English contains plays from the late 14th century to the onset of the Renaissance. It brings together selections from all the major dramatic genres to provide a sense of the breadth and depth of medieval dramatic activity.

Drama, Play, and Game

Drama, Play, and Game
Author: Lawrence M. Clopper
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2001-05
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0226110303

How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question. Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.

Gender and Medieval Drama

Gender and Medieval Drama
Author: Katie Normington
Publisher: DS Brewer
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2004
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781843840275

Evidence from Records of Early English Drama, social, literary and cultural sources are drawn together in order to investigate how performances within the late Middle Ages were both shaped by, and shaped, the public image of women."--BOOK JACKET.

The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama

The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama
Author: Christina M. Fitzgerald
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 595
Release: 2012-12-05
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1554810566

The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical drama—has been fundamentally altered. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays. Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.

Early English Performance: Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games

Early English Performance: Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games
Author: John Marshall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0429765010

Covering a period of nearly 40 years’ work by the author this collection of essays in the Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies series brings the perspective of a Drama academic and practitioner of early English plays to the understanding of how medieval plays and Robin Hood games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were performed. It explores why, where, when, and how the plays happened, who took part, and who were the audiences. The insights are informed by a combination of research and the public presentation of surviving texts. The research included in the volume unites the early English experiences of religious and secular performance. This recognition challenges the dominant critical distinction of the past between the two and the consequent privileging of biblical and moral plays over secular entertainments. What further binds, rather than separates, the two is that the destination of funds raised by the different activities maintained the civic and parochial needs of the institutions upon which the people depended. This collection redefines the inclusive nature and common interests of the purposes that lay behind generically different undertakings. They shared an extraordinary investment of human and financial resources in the anticipation of a profit that was pious and practical. (CS1081).

Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre

Staging Conventions in Medieval English Theatre
Author: Philip Butterworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2014-06-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107015480

Examines staging conventions in the medieval English theatre and ways in which they conditioned the reactions of the audience.