Dumb show

Author(s):  
Jeremy Lopez

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.

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-260
Author(s):  
Oliver Morgan

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.


2021 ◽  

This collection of essays brings together theories of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new understandings of the history and design of early modern English drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an international team of distinguished scholars examines a wide range of games—from dicing to bowling to roleplaying to videogames—to uncover their fascinating ramifications for the stage in Shakespeare's era and our own. Foregrounding ludic elements challenges the traditional view of drama as principally mimesis, or imitation, revealing stageplays to be improvisational experiments and participatory explorations into the motive, means, and value of recreation. Delving into both canonical masterpieces and hidden gems, this innovative volume stakes a claim for play as the crucial link between games and early modern theatre, and for the early modern theatre as a critical site for unraveling the continued cultural significance and performative efficacy of gameplay today.


2021 ◽  

This collection of essays brings together theories of play and game with theatre and performance to produce new understandings of the history and design of early modern English drama. Through literary analysis and embodied practice, an international team of distinguished scholars examines a wide range of games—from dicing to bowling to roleplaying to videogames—to uncover their fascinating ramifications for the stage in Shakespeare’s era and our own. Foregrounding ludic elements challenges the traditional view of drama as principally mimesis, or imitation, revealing stageplays to be improvisational experiments and participatory explorations into the motive, means, and value of recreation. Delving into both canonical masterpieces and hidden gems, this innovative volume stakes a claim for play as the crucial link between games and early modern theatre, and for the early modern theatre as a critical site for unraveling the continued cultural significance and performative efficacy of gameplay today.


Author(s):  
Paul Menzer

This chapter examines the importance of the ‘line’ in the composition, reading, editing, interpretation, and performance of early modern drama. It considers the gradual emergence of the poetic verse that is characteristic of early modern drama and one of the most obviously ‘textual’ units of early modern theatre. It shows that the line, before it became a formal verse element, persisted as a graphic mark, a technology of performance shared by musicians and singers as well as actors and playwrights. It explains how the line, through the printing of plays and poems, became the immaterial metaphysical unit we associate with the period’s finest ‘literary’ writing. It also discusses physical and metaphysical lines and their attempt to regulate silence. Finally, it argues that attention at the level of the line pushes performance towards the typographic, even advancing a kind of ‘typographical acting’ alert to every piece of punctuation, every line break, every diacritically pricked out metrical inflection.


Author(s):  
Robert Henke

This chapter examines how the experience of poverty followed players wherever they travelled, furnishing the European theatre with some of its most popular tropes while at the same time persisting as a raw, brute reality throughout all of its formal translations and displacements. The chapter sets the drama of England, France, Italy, and Spain against the backdrop of the new modes of capitalist accumulation that were beginning to transform European society, including the commercial theatre itself, in order to demonstrate the omnipresence of poverty as theatrical energy in early modern theatre in the form of hunger, physical degradation, begging, charity, and economically induced crime. It shows how poverty functioned as a fertile source for actor’s gags and authors’ conceits and considers the different ways in which the themes and energies of poverty are staged in plays and performance, namely: marginalization, fictionalization, carnivalization, criminalization, repression, and vestigial presence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
E. M. Samogim ◽  
T. C. Oliveira ◽  
Z. N. Figueiredo ◽  
J. M. B. Vanini

The combine harvest for soybean crops market are currently available two types of combine with header or platform, one of conventional with revolving reel with metal or plastic teeth to cause the cut crop to fall into the auger header and the other called "draper" headers that use a fabric or rubber apron instead of a cross auger, there are few test about performance of this combine header for soybean in Mato Grosso State. The aim of this work was to evaluate the soybean harvesting quantitative losses and performance using two types combine header in four travel speed. The experiment was conducted during soybean crops season 2014/15, the farm Tamboril in the municipality of Pontes e Lacerda, State of Mato Grosso. The was used the experimental design of randomized blocks, evaluating four forward harvesting speeds (4 km h-1, 5 km h-1, 6 km h-1 and 7 km h-1), the natural crops losses were analyzed, loss caused by the combine harvester (combine header, internal mechanisms and total losses) and was also estimated the  field performance of each combine. Data were submitted to analysis of variance by F test and compared of the average by Tukey test at 5% probability. The results show the draper header presents a smaller amount of total loss and in most crop yield when compared with the conventional cross auger.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naresh Singla ◽  
Mamandeep Kaur

The growth of agriculture and allied sectors is critical for the Indian economy as about 49 percent of the population is directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. During the last decade and so, the agriculture sector has undergone profound changes resulting in sharp deceleration in its growth. The study has attempted to analyze growth and performance of the agriculture sector in India since 1980-81 and tries to comprehend some of the factors responsible for the deceleration in growth. The study has shown that agriculture sector has been able to show tremendous improvement in expansion of area and production of food grain and non-food grain crops. However, there are so many underlying factors responsible for slowdown of the agricultural growth. Some of the factors identified include: Increase in area under non-agriculture uses, excessive dependence on rain fed farming, increase in number of agricultural labourers, reducing size of the operation holdings, over use of agri-inputs, inequity in the distribution of agriculture credit along with sharp deceleration in public gross capital formation in agriculture etc. The study pointed in order to achieve higher growth rate, there is a need to enhance the gross capital formation in agriculture sector particularly on irrigation so that more area can be brought under assured irrigation. Bringing equity in distribution of agricultural credit coupled with judicious and need-based agricultural inputs are some of the other recommendations drawn based upon the study.


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