Conversional Thinking and the London Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
Stephen Wittek
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Theatrical Culture ◽  
London Stage

This chapter begins to build a framework for understanding the relation between conversion and a key structure of early modern thought: theatrical performance. Taking early modern London as a specific focus, the analysis considers the embeddedness of conversional thinking within the city’s concentration of media resources, placing particular emphasis on the ability of theatrical affordances to facilitate creative experimentation and critical examination around received categories of identity. The central text under consideration is Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, but the analysis is also generally applicable to the theatrical culture and broader media environment of early modern London.

‘Think me cold, frozen, and impotent, and so report me?’: Volpone and His ‘Castrone’ Complex

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Hui
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
The Subject

Reading Jonson with the Fabliau, Boccaccio and Chaucer, this chapter, with the help of Lacan’s theory, rereads Volpone Act 3 scene 7, explaining why Volpone ‘delays’ his ‘rape’ of Celia. While Volpone is commonly known for his love of theatrical performance and transformation, the chapter suggests that this cannot be thought without the concept of his being ‘castrated’. Although ‘castration’ is usually regarded as a censoring force, Volpone is empowered and thrives on it. Moreover, this chapter compares the scene in Volpone with another similar one in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, discussing how the subject of castration is used in early modern comedy and tragicomedy.

[I] ‘did write this Wyll with my own hand’

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-77
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Markidou
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
First Time ◽  
Shed Light

This article attempts for the first time to shed light on the politics of simulation and dissimulation in Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’. It also argues that the poem both reflects its creator’s awareness of the celebrated English historical and topographical narratives and deviates from them by crucially omitting a seminal part of London’s history, namely its Troynovant tradition. In so doing, as well as by defining a paradoxical urban landscape, Whitney presents a tale not of the (mythic) founding of the English capital with its patriarchal and nation-building connotations, but of its (satiric) bequeathal by benevolent femininity, as such offering its reader a different angle from which to explore and interpret early modern London.

The Folly of the Cross

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Satisfaction Model

This work surveys the ways in which theologians, artists, and composers of the early modern period dealt with the passion and death of Christ. The fourth volume in a series, it locates the theology of the cross in the context of modern thought, beginning with the Enlightenment, which challenged traditional Christian notions of salvation and of Christ himself. It shows how new models of salvation were proposed by liberal theology, replacing the older “satisfaction” model with theories of Christ as bringer of God’s spirit and as social revolutionary. It shows how the arts during this period both preserved the classical tradition and responded to innovations in theology and in style.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Metaphysics Of Time ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

This Conclusion draws the study to a close, and recounts its developmental theses. The first thesis is that the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. An enormous variety of positions were defended during this period, going far beyond the well-known absolutism–relationism debate. The second thesis is that during this period three distinct kinds of absolutism can be found in British philosophy: Morean, Gassendist, and Newtonian. The chapter concludes with a few notes on the impact of absolutism within and beyond philosophy: on twenty-first-century metaphysics of time; and on art, geology, and philosophical theology.

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