Introduction

Last Acts ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Ars Moriendi ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Common ◽  
Critical Perspectives

The introduction outlines a theoretical framework for the book. Through a brief survey of critical approaches to Hamlet, it considers the common alignment of early modern drama with mourning and argues that new critical perspectives emerge if we focus on the experience of the dying subject instead. William Perkins’s 1595 tract, A Salve for a Sick Man, illustrates how death was understood around Shakespeare’s time. By situating Perkins’s text in relation to ancient Stoicism and twentieth-century phenomenology, the introduction explicates what is distinctive about the understanding of dying found in the ars moriendi tradition and argues for the theoretical sophistication and continuing influence of the genre.

‘That ubiquitous monarch’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Vandrei
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local History ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Specific Site ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
Historical Culture

This chapter extends the chronology to the first half of the twentieth century, when Boudica emerged as a figure in modern popular culture, particularly in film. But she also acted as an embodiment of local history and identity, once again puncturing the notion that she was merely an icon of empire with no specific ‘site of memory’. Rather, this chapter shows how Boudica came to be associated most notably with the historical narrative of Wales—though not unproblematically. She was also associated with more local histories, in the east of England, where her story was celebrated through the medium of historical pageants. These forms of historical culture show the persistence of history as a form of popular narrative, particularly in the crossovers between early modern drama and twentieth-century film and pageantry. Thus this chapter argues for the localized nature of historical culture, and for Boudica’s geographic and chronological persistence.

Provincial Shakespeare

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-50
Author(s):  
Christopher Marlow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Second World

With reference to aspects of the career of the twentieth-century actor-manager Donald Wolfit and the use of the concept of provincialism in English criticism, this article argues that idealist and universalist values are repeatedly valorised in order to devalue materialist and what might be called ‘provincial’ interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. I pay attention to conditions of production of early modern drama in the sixteenth century, and to Wolfit’s Second World War performances of Shakespeare, the reception of which is offered as evidence for the persistence of a critical prejudice against what is understood as provincial marginality. The article concludes with a reading of The Merry Wives of Windsor that argues that the play supports the provincial values that have so often been dismissed by critics.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

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