Lauren Shohet - Böcker

The first study to consider masques from the point of view of reception as well as production, Reading Masques illuminates intersections of elite and public culture in seventeenth-century England. Court masques, the rhetorically slight but visually and aurally spectacular dramas that framed hours of festive dancing at the English courts of James I and Charles I, were major social occasions for the aristocratic audiences who participated in them, and they have been central to historical and literary considerations of the era's elite culture. However, masques were also undertaken in a far wider range of guises, venues, and decades than has previously been considered. Masques were engaged not only through performance, but also as written texts, through oral report, and adapted as plays, newsbooks, ballads, and operas. Lauren Shohet traces the ways that both courtly and non-courtly masques circulated, connects arenas of performance and print, and rethinks what it means to "read" a masque. Expanding our current understanding of the genre, she draws familiar masques by Jonson, Milton, Davenant, and Shirley together with both lesser known masques and better known plays. The study interweaves analysis of text, music, and spectacle with research into the printing, marketing, and readership of masques, demonstrating the form's importance beyond the social and historical parameters of other studies. Masques' participation in emergent news culture, public theatre, and pamphlet debate reveals the masque's wide significance not only in the Stuart era, but also during the Interregnum, the Restoration, and beyond. As early opera, masques adapted and carried forward Shakespeare and other Tudor-Stuart dramatists, proving central for the construction of a national dramatic canon.

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England grew from a marginal to a major European power, established overseas settlements, and negotiated the Protestant Reformation. The population burgeoned and became increasingly urban. England also saw the meteoric rise of commercial theatre in London, the creation of a vigorous market for printed texts, and the emergence of writing as a viable profession. Literacy rates exploded, and an increasingly diverse audience encountered a profusion of new textual forms. Media, and literary culture, transformed on a scale that would not happen again until television and the Internet. The twenty innovative contributions in Gathering Force: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1557-1623 trace ways that five different genres both spurred and responded to change. Chapters explore different facets of lyric poetry, romance, commercial drama, masques and pageants, and non-narrative prose. Exciting and accessible, this volume illuminates the dynamic relationships among the period's social, political, and literary transformations.

Focusing on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, these original essays by leading scholars explore how theatrical, aesthetic, and linguistic forms engage early modern experiences of temporality. Encompassing comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, some contributions consider how different models of pastness, presentness, sequentiality, memory, and historical meaning underwrite particular representational practices. Others, conversely, investigate how aesthetic forms afforded diverse ways for early-modern people to understand or experience time - and how this can impact us today.

Focusing on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, these original essays by leading scholars explore how theatrical, aesthetic, and linguistic forms engage early modern experiences of temporality. Encompassing comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, some contributions consider how different models of pastness, presentness, sequentiality, memory, and historical meaning underwrite particular representational practices. Others, conversely, investigate how aesthetic forms afforded diverse ways for early-modern people to understand or experience time - and how this can impact us today.

What does queer death have to do with early modern England? This collection interrogates the profoundly queer, strange, excessive, camp and uncanny dimensions of death in early modern English literary, theatrical, and material archives.Contributors provide new insights on death by using the analytic tools of queer theory, via non-binary analyses of gender, sexuality, humanity, nature, embodiment, and temporality. Turning queer analysis to questions of death allows it to be understood as non-dualist, non-linear, a-teleological, and fruitfully muddled. The essays illuminate early modern experiences before the ascendancy of Cartesian dualism occluded alternative understandings of death. They also speak to a present and a future where many received paradigms no longer hold. Key dramatic texts from the early modern period, including The Duchess of Malfi, The Alchemist, The Spanish Tragedy, The Winter’s Tale, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, show the expansive possibilities of death and dying in a queer mode. Further essays consider queer dimensions of death in lyric poetry, animal husbandry, typology, and Shakespearean authorship. These approaches make clear why readers interested in queerness and death should immerse themselves in the cultural life of sixteenth and seventeenth century England.