A collection of scholarly essays exploring relationships between
'stage' and 'world' in the drama and ritual performance of late
medieval and early modern England.
The thirteen essays collected in ‘This Earthly
Stage’ explore intersections between the world as stage
and the stage as world in late medieval and early modern England.
The volume features studies of stages both familiar and unfamiliar,
and worlds old and new - from the ritual performance of funerals
for the fifteenth-century London elite to the electronic recreation
of Shakespeare on the Internet. The essays engage with a variety of
scholarly fields, including art and iconography, cultural and
social history, digital humanities, literature, myth, philology,
and philosophy. Most studies examine performative elements of
Shakespeare’s works in relation to a representative selection
of other plays from the dramatic genres in which he wrote, while
they also analyse broader topics which traverse a number of plays,
such as kingship and rites of civic performance in relation to
stage drama. All of the essays consider the overarching issue of
representation in late medieval and early modern English drama and
culture through a range of theoretical approaches. This volume
offers a valuable contribution to contemporary medieval and early
modern scholarship, with a particular interest for those
researching and teaching early modern English drama and
culture.
Introduction - CHRISTOPHER WORTHAM
‘Bi-fold Authority’: The Electronic Re-creation of Shakespeare - MICHAEL BEST
Pruning the Tree of Virtue in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus - VICTORIA BLADEN
Twentieth-Century Australian Dreams - ALAN BRISSENDEN
Contagious Emulation: Antitheatricality and Theatre as Plague in Troilus and Cressida - DARRYL CHALK
The Elemental Gertrude: Howard Barker’s Refashioning of Hamlet’s Mother - STEVE CHINNA
‘I take pleasure in singing, sir’: Towards an Interpretation of Shakespearean Song - HEATHER DUBROW
From Jew to Puritan: The Emblematic Owl in Early English Culture - BRETT D. HIRSCH
‘Romancing the Handbook’: Scenes of Detection in Arden of Faversham - HEATHER KERR
Edward II and the Rhetoricians of Myth - CLAYTON G. MACKENZIE
Making Men out of Kings: Shakespeare’s Sources and Kingship - MARY-ROSE MCLAREN
Informing Audiences: Marlowe’s Early Tragedies - LUCY POTTER
Private Drama, Public Spectacle: Death and the Pre-Reformation London Elite - JOHN TILLOTSON
Irony and Transcendence on the Renaissance Stage - LAURENCE WRIGHT
Index
""This Earthly Stage" is a collection well worth exploring for its diversity as well as for its two valuable contributions on Marlowe."
(R. Lunney, in Marlowe Society of America Newsletter, vol. 31, 2012, n°2, p. 11)