Games

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gina Bloom
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Activity ◽  
Board Games ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Arden Of Faversham

This chapter examines the historical intersections between theatre and games in order to understand the formal dimensions of spectatorship within the specific institution of the early modern theatre and the dramas staged within it. It considers how early modern card and board games would have trained theatre audiences in the performative conventions of a newly commercialized stage, and how theatricality itself becomes a kind of game whose rules are explored, modified, and constantly reinvented through their performance by actors and the audiences who watched them. It shows that staged parlour games in the playsA Woman Killed with KindnessandArden of Favershamcall upon audiences to participate in theatre in ways that are reminiscent of traditional and rival entertainment forms. It also argues that game scenes in drama do not simply theatricalize the everyday activity of playing games in a tavern or parlour. Rather, they take advantage of the fact that the experiences of gameplay and of theatre-going were commensurate on a number of levels.

“MY FEET SEE BETTER THAN MY EYES”: SPATIAL MASTERY AND THE GAME OF MASCULINITY IN ARDEN OF FAVERSHAM'S AMPHITHEATRE

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gina Bloom
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Arden Of Faversham ◽  
Better Than

Although the long-awaited murder of Arden in the anonymous Arden of Faversham (ca. 1592) takes place during a game of tables, or what we call backgammon,1 critics have been quick to overlook the choice of game in this climactic scene, underestimating its importance to the play's central concerns and even mistakenly calling it a game of dice or cards.2 These games do share some common features—backgammon, for instance, involves the use of dice—but the distinctions among them are significant, especially for the play's often-observed interests in geography and place. In attending to the intersection between games and theatre, I participate in a long tradition of performance studies scholarship. But in contrast to much of this scholarship, I emphasize the formal qualities of particular games—which vary widely from one game to another—arguing that different games call for unique competencies in players and in spectators of games.3Arden of Faversham reflects on spatial relations in the early modern theatre by staging and enacting the ludic competencies peculiar to backgammon.

Staging Romance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Spatial Grammar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter explores the mostly overlooked history of romance on the early modern stage. Analysing the geographies of two little-known plays, Clyomon and Clamydes (1580s?) and Guy of Warwick (early 1590s?), it argues that, in its imaginative openness and its flexible staging of space, the early modern theatre was the ideal environment in which to stage romance’s extravagant spatial and ethnographical imaginings. Further, the chapter demonstrates how a theatrical tradition of clowning enabled these late-Elizabethan dramas to contest the values of the very romance-worlds they had established. It closes with a fresh reading of Francis Beaumont’s parody of romance, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, arguing that the play satirizes dramatic romance’s spatial grammar as well as its narrative strategies.

scholarly journals Titian’sChrist with the Coin: Recovering the Spiritual Currency of Numismatics in Renaissance Ferrara

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Nygren
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Activity ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Exegetical Tradition

AbstractTitian paintedChrist with the Coinfor Alfonso d’Este around 1516. The painting served as the cover piece for a collection of ancient coins and has been read as a commentary on politics and taxation. Instead, this article reveals how the painting reconfigured Alfonso’s interaction with ancient coins, transforming the everyday activity of the collector into an occasion of spiritual reformation. Reading numismatic antiquarianism against the exegetical tradition that accrued around the Gospel pericope (Matthew 22:21) reveals the painting as the nexus of two regimes of virtue — one Christian, one classical — both of which turn upon coins as manifold objects.

Ekphrasis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Altman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Word Painting ◽  
English Stage ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Flexible Capacity

This chapter examines the use of ekphrasis in early modern theatre, with particular emphasis on its effect on the stage and the relationship of ekphrastic speech to the ongoing action in which it is enunciated. It maps the parameters of ekphrasis on the early modern English stage by considering a few examples of the ways in which ekphrasis instantiates early modern theatricality. It also discusses the expressive potential of ekphrastic speech and its transmission to the listener as well as the ironic uses of ekphrasis as a mode of persuasion, whether directed to oneself, an on-stage auditor, off-stage auditors, or all three. It argues that ekphrasis creates nothing less than what it calls ‘the psyche of the play’ and explains how the unusually flexible capacity of the staged word allows it to be used for a wide range of theatrical techniques, including the usual sense of ‘word-painting’. Finally, it looks at William Shakespeare’s deployment of ekphrasis in his work such asHamlet.

Dumb show

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Lopez
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Popular Audience

This chapter examines the theatrical experience provided by early modern dumb shows and the critical tradition that has emerged around them. It argues that dumb shows are a threshold between drama and theatricality, and that they vividly represent not only the contest between text and performance for authority over theatrical meaning, but also the tendency of each to displace this authority onto the other. In the canon of early modern theatre and in the modern critical tradition, dumb shows are often a sign of a derivative theatricality directed at a merely popular audience. In the dumb show, there is an especially complex and self-conscious encounter between word and action, diegesis and mimesis, presentational vehicles and represented fiction. As a moment of extraordinary semiotic density and redundancy, the dumb show was at once too readerly for the stage and too spectacular for the printed book. The chapter also considers ‘Hamlet’s advice to the players’ and its implications for approaches and responses to the dumb show.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-260
Author(s):  
Oliver Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Turn Taking ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the implications the turn-taking approach for our understanding of early modern performance practices. On the one hand, Shakespearean dialogue is full of subtle effects of timing and sequence that would seem to call for careful rehearsal and a detailed knowledge of the script. On the other hand, everything we know about early modern theatre suggests it was performed with minimal rehearsal by actors who did not necessarily know when, or from where, their next cue would arrive. This apparent mismatch I call ‘the performability gap’. The question is how it can be bridged. The explanation provided by Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern—that Shakespeare’s plays are designed to make artistic capital from their own under-rehearsal—does not entirely solve the problem. The second half of the chapter speculates about how else we might account for the gap.

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