Caroline Stage Research Articles

Re-examining the Date of William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust

Following G.E. Bentley’s The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, scholars normally date William Rowley’s tragedy All’s Lost by Lust to 1619-20. Re-examining the evidence shows Bentley’s interpretation was faulty: the play could date to any point between 1611 and 1621, although similarities with other plays suggest that it was most likely written toward the latter end of that spectrum. Broader possibilities for the play’s date help us to recognize overlooked connections among Rowley’s plays, illuminate Christopher Beeston’s relationship with the playing companies at the Phoenix playhouse, and facilitate the dating of some fragmentary playlists from the revels office.

The Anatomy of the Revenger: Violence and Dissection on the Early Modern English Stage

The persistent employment of excessive violence on the early modern English stage was studied by Renaissance scholarship for centuries in diverse but rather formal or historicist ways, and this critical focus received no new impetus until the corporal turn in critical theory after the 1980s. Before the poststructuralist, or, more precisely, the postsemiotic and corposemiotic investigations, critics tended to categorize bodily transgression as part of the general process of deterioration that lead to the decadence and all-enveloping perversity of the Stuart and Caroline stage, or they merely catalogued the metamorphoses of iconographic and emblematic elements of the memento mori, the ars moriendi, the contemptus mundi, the danse macabre or the exemplum horrendum traditions through the imagery of violence, mutilation and corporeal disintegration. The reception history of Shakespeare’s first tragedy exemplifies the general hostility towards extreme violence, an attitude which was established by the technologies of canon formation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Staging Authority in Caroline England: Prerogative, Law and Order in Drama, 1625–1642 by Jessica Dyson (review)

Jessica Dyson. Staging Authority Caroline England: Law and Order Drama, 1625-1642. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. x + 224. $109.95. With its focus on often overlooked riches of Caroline stage and its attention to period's central political and legal debates, Jessica Dyson's Staging Authority Caroline England: Law and Order Drama, 1625-1642 makes a worthy contribution to recent scholarship on early modern theater. Dyson's work especially useful for its clear, efficient discussions of historical contexts as well as theoretical lineaments of Caroline disputes about monarchical and for its close readings of language and stakes of these debates period's drama. Dyson's introductory chapter effectively establishes her interest Caroline theater as a forum for period's competing articulations of royal and common law as they took shape against King Charles Is increasingly personal rule (2). She identifies her approach to drama as more oppositional than those of influential critics such as Martin Butler, but she careful to insist that playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, Philip Massinger, John Ford, or James Shirley offered challenges not to Charles's position as but rather to ability to act above, beyond or outside established laws of country (9). In these challenges, she adds eloquently, their drama diagnosed a dynamic by which Charles I, in over-asserting kingly and central authority, ... raise[d] possibilities of destabilization, fragmentation and disintegration of legitimate legal authority (13). Chapter 1, Rights, Prerogatives and Law: The Petition of Right, investigates acute constitutional issues driving 1628 Petition of Right and their enactment on stage. She reads petition, which crystallized competing interests of Parliament and King matters of taxation and martial law, as a symbol of widespread fear of royal absolutism and of a concomitant loss of traditional liberties. She then examines plays that juggle these concerns, arguing that Ben Jonson's The New Inn advocates balance of subjects' rights against a moderated, if not curtailed, royal prerogative (20) and that Richard Bromes The Love-Sick Court offers not only predictable critique of self-interested courtiers and their bad counsel--readings offered by Butler and Matthew Steggle--but also a more pointed political statement about the usefulness of parliaments and necessity of calling them (44). Chapter 2, Shaking Foundations of Royal Authority: From Divine Right to King's Will, surveys contemporary accounts of royal authority--theories of divine right, of designation, and of contract--and then charts Philip Massinger's representations, over course of three plays, of this and its relation to law. She traces an arc of declining divinity: from king as undeniably a god with extra-legal power The Roman Actor to king as undeniably mortal, willful, and fallible The Emperor of East and The Guardian. Although theoretical background here cogent, some of specific readings are overly literal ways that undermine idea of a declining divinity; it maybe true that Domitian The Roman Actor presented as a divine ruler and that his extra-legal is not denied (66), but play neither condones nor reinforces this position--it seems to put it into question order to insist on Domitians very human status and passions. Dysons treatment of The Guardian, which sees outlaw Severino as a critique of, rather than a substitute for, absolute power, more assured and convincing. The third chapter, Debating Legal Authorities: Common Law and Prerogative, sets common law center stage, as a legitimate alternative to will of monarch as foundation of realm. …

Taste, Theatrical Venues, and the Rise of English Tragicomedy

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s tragicomedies exerted an enormous influence on the Jacobean and Caroline stage. This essay argues that tragicomedy developed as a response to London’s competing theatrical venues, particularly their attempts to acquire prestige. Tragicomedy alluded to a wide variety of different dramatic and literary works, and by combining texts in this way Beaumont and Fletcher could disparage the popular dramatic styles at competing playhouses. This underlying concern also explains the focus on aristocratic identity in the plays. Tragicomedy helped make the Blackfriars a place where audiences could gain cultural knowledge and acquire good taste.

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Barbara Wooding. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. xiii + 210 pp. $99.95.

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Barbara Wooding. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. xiii + 210 pp. $99.95. - Volume 68 Issue 3

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage by Barbara Wooding (review)

Barbara Wooding. John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603-1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. xiii + 209. 60.00 [pounds sterling]. If one evaluates a life purely in terms of the cultural and artistic experiences it contains, then John Lowin enjoyed arguably one of the most enviable lives in history. In a theatrical career spanning almost fifty years, he was present (one may assume) at the first performances of almost all Shakespeare's Jacobean plays: indeed, he was on stage for those first performances, as one of Shakespeare's leading men. But he was also the first Mammon in Alchemist; the first Bosola in Duchess of Malfi; and the creator of identifiable roles in plays by Fletcher, Massinger, and others. In fact, he was a member of the original cast of a large proportion of the masterpieces of Jacobean and Caroline drama. First recorded in Henslowe's Diary working for Worcester's Men, he worked his way up to become a senior figure in the King's Men, the leading theater company of their day, and was for a long time their effective leader. For all these reasons, then, he is a pivotal figure in early modern English theater, and Barbara Wooding's new biography of him is to be celebrated. Born (probably) in 1576, John Lowin is first documented for certain in 1594, as an apprentice goldsmith. Chapter 1 of Wooding's study documents this part of his career, uncovering, for instance, new archival evidence about the shady practices of his master, who was in repeated trouble with the authorities for using substandard metal. After completing his apprenticeship, he starts to appear in Henslowe's Diary as a member of the relatively obscure Worcester's Men in connection with such intriguing lost plays as The Italian The Unfortunate General, and The Second Part of the Black Dog [of Newgate]. In 1603, Lowin transferred his services to the company soon to be known as the King's Men. Wooding observes, It was the best career choice he ever made (10). chapter, Pamphlets, Plays, Pageants, and 'Prentices, traces career up to around 1613. Wooding has intriguing material to go at, including the fascinatingly uninformative print pamphlet Conclusions upon Dances, written by Lowin around 1605; and Maid's Tragedy, in which Lowin is known to have played the part of Melantius. Wooding mixes this together with what is known of life story, and with the history of the period and the cultural history of the stage. She uses parish records, literary texts, and theater-history documents to weave the story together. There is a wealth of documentation, although Lowin himself remains an elusive figure. Wooding observes in a later chapter--and it is a recurring note through the book--that Lowin's opinion, as always, is not on record (90). From 1627 onwards Lowin was one of two Housekeepers--effectively, co-leaders--of the King's Men. As his role as theater manager becomes more important, the book turns into an almost annalistic history of the company. There are long sections on, for instance, Massinger's Roman Actor and the challenges it might offer in performance; on the second war of the theaters, so called; and on the evolving history of the King's Men up to the 1642 closure. one exception to this basic chronological plan is provided by chapter 8, an in-depth discussion of the incomplete manuscript of the Caroline comedy Soddered Citizen. manuscript contains numerous signs of revision, in various hands, which, Wooding argues convincingly, demonstrates the input of the players themselves (and by implication of their leader Lowin). A final chapter reviews what is known about activities after the 1642 closure, finding him active in projects such as the attempts to revive playing during the Commonwealth, and the Beaumont and Fletcher publications. beauty of a chronological, biographical journey through the theatrical history of this period is not that it offers a complete revision of what is currently known about that history, but that it gives it all a human timescale. …

:John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage

:<i>John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage</i>

Staging "a Queene opprest": William Habington's Exploration of the Politics of Queenship on the Caroline Stage

This essay deepens our growing understanding of Caroline theatre as a vibrant space that boldly engaged with contemporary issues. As England lurched toward civil war, there was growing unease within the Protestant establishment at the apparent success of Queen Henrietta Maria's Counter-Reformation ambitions. During this period, competing ideals of queenly conduct were performed on both the elite and commercial stages. William Habington's The Queen of Aragon (licensed and published in 1640) exposed the dilemma of a virtuous queen chastised by her people for seeking foreign support to quell insurrection. Notably, Henrietta Maria was criticized in precisely these terms during the Scottish crisis of 1638-40. Habington, a respected figure in the recusant community who enjoyed the patronage of both Henrietta Maria and the godly Earl of Pembroke, offered a surprising alternative to such political isolation. Through a brilliant revision of fashionable Neoplatonic drama, he successfully transformed the troubling image of "a Queene opprest" into a paradigm of queenly enlightenment.

Introduction: Marlowe the Play-maker

Introduction: Marlowe the Play-maker Pierre Hecker and Roslyn L. Knutson I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, Musicians, that with touching of a string May draw the pliant king which way I please. Music and poetry is his delight; Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night, Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows . . . (Edward II, 1.1.50–55) Christopher Marlowe made his most explicit metatheatrical statement in his last play, and he gave it to a transgressive character. Gaveston knows how to put on a show, and so does the writer who created him. This special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin seeks to foreground the status of Marlowe as a man of the theater. Thomas Beard in 1618 famously referred to Marlowe as “a Poet and a filthy Play-maker,” but the earliest allusions to Marlowe focus very much on the former and rarely on the latter. Two exceptions prove the rule: in A Knight’s Conjuring Thomas Dekker imagines a fraternal gathering of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Nashe in an Elysian bower–Marlowe’s playwriting identity deducible from the company he keeps. And Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia in 1598 lists Marlowe as among “our best for Tragedie.” In other references in the same work, however, Meres remembers Marlowe as poet. Marlowe is one by whose writing “the English tongue is mightily enriched, and gorgeouslie inuested in rare ornaments and resplendent abiliments . . . ”; and Meres later refers to Marlowe and George Chapman as “two excellent Poets.” Ben Jonson, in his commendatory poem addressed to Shakespeare in the First Folio, would set the parameters for four centuries of the critical study of Marlowe with three words: “Marlowes mighty line.” Indeed, poetry was inseparable from Marlowe’s writerly identity from the first. In 1593, a little month after Marlowe died, George Peele celebrates him in The Honour of the Garter as “the Muses’ darling for [End Page 1] [his] verse.” Michael Drayton in 1627 writes of Marlowe, poet of “verses cleere,” that he possessed the “fine madnes” of poets, his “raptures” being “All ayre, and fire.” Thus for his contemporaries, Marlowe is a poet, a wordsmith, a crafter of verse; on his craft as an artist of performance, his contemporaries are silent. How Marlowe saw himself is, alas, lost to history. As J.A. Downie puts it bluntly, “We know next to nothing about Christopher Marlowe” (13). With Shakespeare, we know at least that he started in London as a player, the transition to writer and shareholder being logical, sensible, and documented. We have no comparable understanding of why or under what circumstances Marlowe got into the business of playmaking at the end of his career at Cambridge. For evidence of his craft we are left with the plays themselves. There is good scholarship on Marlovian theatre and stage history, but there is much more to be done. Our first contributor, Evelyn Tribble, in “Marlowe’s Boy Actors,” investigates the area of boy players and apprenticeship. Scrutinizing embedded instructions and devices serving to ease memorization and the actor’s alertness to cues on stage, she demonstrates not only Marlowe’s acquaintance with but mastery of the ‘enskillment’ system by which the boys were trained and initiated into the theatre companies. In the next essay, “Marlowe’s Knifework,” Rick Bowers examines the properties of knives and how Marlowe’s kinæsthetic theatricality elicits from the audience real, visceral responses to the unreal stage violence. Marlowe as dramatist is too frequently measured in terms of Shakespeare, yet his influence extended to the repertory of the companies that held his plays well into the seventeenth century. Scholars have recognized the “sons of Tamburlaine” in Marlowe’s immediate wake. Here, Tom Rutter identifies additional descendants by showing how persistently Marlowe’s style and stagecraft were emulated by dramatists who supplied plays to the Admiral’s Men. Lucy Munro, analyzing Marlowe’s influence on the Caroline stage, argues that for these later audiences Marlowe’s plays were, paradoxically, “both comfortingly familiar and appealingly alien,” that is, dated but nonetheless fresh and vital. Currently, Marlowe’s plays are experiencing a revival with some of the mix of archaism and experimentation enjoyed by seventeenth-century audiences. Innovations are...

Marlowe on the Caroline Stage

My starting point for this essay is not Marlowe himself, but William Davenant's 1663 work The Playhouse to be Let, and an exchange between a Player and a Poet that concludes a sequence commenting on the vagaries of audience taste and dramatic fare in the years immediately following the reestablishment of the professional theatre industry. The Poet proposes to attract audiences to the deserted playhouse through Romances travesti in which the players present the actions of the Heroes, / (Which the chiefest Theams of Tragedy) / In Verse Burlesque (Davenant pt 2, 75). He will, he tells the Player, introduce such folly as shall / Make you wise; that is, shall make you rich. The Player finally agrees, saying, Well, we'll be content, like other rich Fools, / To be laught (76). But then, intriguingly in the context of the sequence's concern with modish dramatic fashion, he concludes by saying, There is an old tradition That in the times of mighty Tamberlane, Of conjuring Faustus, and the Beauchamps bold, You Poets us'd to have the second day. This shall be ours, Sir, and to morrow yours. (76) The references to the titles of older plays not necessary to make the Player's point, which is that they should revive the old custom of benefit days for playwrights. Instead, they invoked as shorthand for an older dramatic tradition, one in which, is implied, actors were real actors--reliant on their own prowess and charisma rather than on foreign novelty--and English drama was really English. Davenant's references to Marlowe's plays mark, I suggest, both the culmination of a process that had been at work before the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 and a break with it. By the early 1660s, after the Civil War and Commonwealth break in routine professional theatrical activity, Elizabethan drama could function comparatively unproblematically as nostalgia or as shorthand for a past age of theatre. Of the plays mentioned in Davenant's induction, only Doctor Faustus seems to have been performed in the Restoration, and the fact that was performed at the Red Bull, the only surviving pre-war playhouse, may have added to its lack of fashionable polish. Samuel Pepys saw there in May 1662 and commented that was so wretchedly and poorly done that we were sick of it (Bevington and Rasmussen 51). However, in the Caroline period the place of older plays was more complex. Theatrical culture might be branding them as old, or even archaic, but was also dependent on the continuous tradition of performance and reception which they embodied. We might draw connections between the ways in which old plays functioned in the playhouse and in the printing house. As Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser have recently argued, the publication of plays in this period was undergoing a series of changes, changes which eventually led to the development of a select canon of classic plays that continued to sell in huge numbers thirty or forty years after their original publication. Moreover, some old plays--including Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen, Fletcher's Wit Without Money and The Night Walker, and Henry Chettle's Hoffman--were published for the first time in the 1630s, as publishers attempted to create undiscovered (Canons 32-5). (1) These they contend, are not merely older than but significantly different from Caroline plays, and while they may fall short of contemporary drama in the nicety of form and language (together with the scurrility and ribaldry) favored by a 'witty age' of 'greater curiosity,' they surpass them in a direct and unrefined style appreciated by numerous playgoers and readers (Canons 34-5). (2) Farmer and Lesser argue that printed drama may have had a relative independence from the (Canons 40; Popularity 11-13, 26), suggesting that their group of classics testifies at least as much to the ongoing demand for these plays as books as to the possibility that they continued to be performed on stage (Canons 40). …

A Source for Bertha and Parallels with Henrietta Maria in The Queenes Exchange

RICHARD BROME'S The Queenes Exchange is set in a Saxon England of unknown date. The primary plot involves Bertha, Queen of the West Saxons, who fails to marry Osriick, King of Northumbria. Rather, she mistakenly, but happily, marries a son of one of her lords who bears a striking resemblance to the king. The Queenes Exchange was probably first performed around the time of Charles's Scottish coronation in 1633, and as Matthew Steggle suggests in his book, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage, at a time when the union between England and Scotland was under scrutiny, the happy failure of Bertha to marry the northern king (thus not uniting their kingdoms) would be seen as a comment on the union.1 In this note I wish suggest a possible source for the character of Bertha which has the potential for further readings of the play connected to the Caroline court.

Review: Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage

Review: Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage

Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (review)

112Comparative Drama for the study ofproduction and reception ofwork by these playwrights and the type oftheater companies that stage them. Where are the theater scholars who can take up this call to do the deep work of recording this theater practice and reception instead of letting the texts be the privileged record? Griffin is not positioned to do this work, but her fine study paves the way for it. Sara Freeman Illinois Wesleyan University Matthew Steggle. Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Pp. 222. $74.95. Matthew Steggle's RichardBrome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage is a welcome addition to the Revels Plays Companion Library. Indeed, this volume solidly lives up to the claim on the back cover as "the authoritative reference work on this appealing and underrated playwright." Steggle organizes the book as a chronological journey through Bromes career, situating his fifteen noncollaborative plays and sole surviving collaborations , The Late Lancashire Witches or The Witches ofLancashire and A lovial Crew, within historical contexts as they relate to the play's date of composition and/or performance. Through impressively controlled readings ofthe plays and other primary source materials, Steggle outlines a thorough—and thoroughly convincing—chronology that corrects some previous attributions and minimizes or eliminates some previously made guesses. In addition Steggle provides a critical companion that meticulously addresses scholarly discussions of Brome and advances that discussion by several giant leaps. In his introduction Steggle clearly foregrounds his argument as he surveys past scholarship on Brome. Steggle challenges outmoded assumptions that Brome's supposed artistic limitations are a reflection of low-class standing; he observes that Brome's obvious success and prominence during his lifetime and afterward belie such narrow thinking. While Brome was indeed Ben Jonson's manservant, Steggle suggests that there is a clear evolution in their relationship, from manservant, to rival, to friend. Clearly Brome was also Jonson's student in many ways, just as he was Shakespeare's; Steggle draws this observation out at several points in the subsequent chapters. At the heart of the introduction is Steggle's principal contention—pursued and buttressed through his subsequent analyses—that Brome is a more interesting, complex, and important playwright Reviews113 than he has previously been acknowledged to be. The sum ofthe evidence that Steggle offers decidedly convinces. Although the body of scholarship devoted to Brome is not vast, Steggle's reading and knowledge is and, as a result, this bookvery effectively explores the political, social, and topical implications of Brome's work. Moreover, Steggle situates, or "places," Brome in far more detailed contexts than has previously been attempted. Indeed, as his book's subtitle (PlaceandPolitics on the Caroline Stage) implies, place or location—in material,cultural,political, economic, geographical , and literary-historical terms—is a central theme in Steggle's study of Brome's life and works. Clearly Martin Butler's Theater and Crisis, 1632-1642 is a crucialworkfor Steggle's arguments here; important as that study is,Steggle's use ofit in delving into more specifics concerning Brome's career from artistic, political, and legal standpoints is compelling. Similarly, Steggle makes effective use of Ralph J. Kauffman's 1961 Richard Brome: Caroline Dramatist, subtly yet steadily revealing the obvious datedness of that work. Politely acknowledging as he does that certain archival materials and scholarly achievements postdated Kauffman's work in no waylessens the extent to which Steggle confidently overgoes Kauffman's critical biography. For nearly all of the plays the central thematic link for Steggle is Brome's manipulation of"place-realism."While this and other elements do indeed show Brome to be a writer who bridges the gap between the earlier plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher and others, and the later Restoration Comedy, Steggle is right to assert that there is more to be said. While all of his readings reveal a profound knowledge of the various cultural, physical, geographical, economic, political, and literary intertexts that inform Brome's work writ large, Steggle's reading of The Northern Lass is especially instructive. Perhaps Brome's earliest play, The Northern Lass, as Steggle compellingly reads it, employs place-realism in order to present a protofeminist text...

Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 by John Ripley

REVIEWS such patterns, but in the surviving archive of documents about the early modern theatre. These records show how “authorial presence” was compromised by habitual collaboration in the preparation of scripts for the stage and by equally habitual re­ vision of them by the companies, especially on the occasion of the revival of popular plays. Tromly’s readers will have to de­ cide for themselves whether to trust “patterns” or records, but readers deserve to hear the voices, suppressed in this book, of those who have studied the latter. According to G. E. Bentley, author of the seven-volume Jacobean and Caroline Stage, “al­ together the evidence suggests that it would be reasonable to guess that as many as half of the plays by professional drama­ tists in the period incorporated the writing at some date of more than one man” (Profession 199). Bentley also tells us that “re­ vision of dramatists’ manuscripts in the theatres occurred when the actors prepared the play for revival. There are a great many records of one sort or another of this common practice; even the general public seems to have taken it for granted” (Profession 237). No scholar who attends to these records would simply pre­ sume, as Tromly does, Marlowe’s unaided composition of The Jew of Malta in the form in which that play descends to us, since the only extant version of The Jew was not published until 1633, forty years after Marlowe’s death. WORKS CITED Bentley, G. E. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 7 vols. Oxford: Claren­ don, 1941-68. ------ . The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 15901642 . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. PAUL WERSTINE / King’s College, University of Western Ontario John Ripley. Coriolanus on Stage in England and America, 1609-1994■ Teaneck NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Very much in the vein of John Ripley’s earlier book on Julius Caesar (1980), this is an impressively complete and judicious 225 ESC 26, 2000 history of a major Shakespeare play as it has been performed on English and American stages. Beginning with a little spec­ ulative reconstruction of what might have been the conditions and modes of its original performance, the author moves into a discussion of the style and structure of the play. His astute analysis of its performative rhythm provides the basis for his subsequent account of the attempts and repeated failures of production to take the measure of this complex and sometimes uninviting play. For, in a sense, failure is Ripley’s theme. As he makes clear throughout and reiterates in his Afterword, there seems never to have been in his eyes a fully successful version of the play. All have been partial, too quick to “stabilize” what Shakespeare leaves deliberately indeterminate, too eager to pro­ vide clarity of motivation and political alignment to characters and situations that Shakespeare leaves fruitfully ambiguous. In offering a prescription for what could be done to rem­ edy this situation, Ripley perhaps asks for too much. Indeed it is probably not possible to mount a production that would answer, and thus put an end to, all professorial desire. What would be desirable, as the author outlines it, includes an un­ cut text, an artful balance of psychology and politics, and a perfect weighting of the different forces in the play. He calls as well for equal emphasis on the three “centres of interest” in the play — the patrician-plebeian conflict, the military struggle, and the mother-son relationship — and for a perceptive attunement to the structural harmonies. A salient example of the fail­ ure of producers to tune in to the careful structure, he argues, is the almost universal cutting of a “pivotal” scene (4.3) that is actually a “key aesthetic device” (336) linking the two main movements of the play. Coming from an historian of the the­ atre, such prescriptions seem a bit surprising; they sound too much like a literary wish-list, too much at odds with the his­ torian’s even-handed consideration of the flow of productions as they have negotiated the tricky terrain marked by stylistic imperatives, audience taste, actorly skill, and the demands of the text. Ripley, like most...

New Renaissance Players' Wills

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and DocumentsNew Renaissance Players' WillsS. P. CerasanoS. P. Cerasano Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 82, Number 3Feb., 1985 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391386 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1985 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Kevin Chovanec Faust mit Springen: On the English Players Returning Faustus to the German-Speaking Lands, Renaissance Drama 44, no.22 (Nov 2016): 125–155.https://doi.org/10.1086/688685

The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Vol. VI: Theatres

The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Vol. VI: Theatres

"The Jacobean and Caroline Stage" Quartos from Princeton Collections

"The Jacobean and Caroline Stage" Quartos from Princeton Collections

The Jacobean and Caroline Stage

The Jacobean and Caroline Stage

The Jacobean and Caroline Stage

The Jacobean and Caroline Stage

Reviews of Books

Journal Article Reviews of Books Get access The Jacobean and Caroline Stage: Plays and Playwrights. By GERAILD EADES BENTLEY. Vols. iii to v. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956.) GODFREY DAVIES GODFREY DAVIES Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume LXXII, Issue CCLXXXIII, April 1957, Pages 323–325, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/LXXII.CCLXXXIII.323 Published: 01 April 1957