Book Reviews: Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modem Stage, the Renaissance World, Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning, Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres, the Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music, the Arden Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, All's Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays, the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, the Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, Shakespeare and Garrick, La Tempesta. Tradotta e messa in scena 1977–78, Macbeth: New Critical Essays, Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks

2008 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-112
Author(s):  
Sonia Massai ◽  
Rachel Willie ◽  
Martyn Bennett ◽  
Anthony Ellis ◽  
Claire Bardelmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Italian Culture ◽  
Textual Culture

Competitive Capers

2018 ◽  
pp. 64-86
Author(s):  
Emily Winerock
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Dance Floor ◽  
William Rowley ◽  
Modern Period

Whereas much of the dancing of the early modern period emphasized the cohesion or “harmoniousness” of the group, competitive dancing allowed participants to distinguish themselves as individuals. In formal, staged competitions and in informal dance-offs, dancing highlighted individuals’ grace and skill. In addition, masterful dancing implied excellence more broadly: for men, impressive athletic displays on the dance floor also suggested virility and sexual prowess. This chapter examines two groups of complementary sources for early modern competitive dancing: didactic manuals that provide detailed instructions for dances like the galliard and games like “Kick the Tassel,” and literary works that stage or describe competitive dancing, with particular attention to Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and Philip Massinger’s The Old Law, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder, and an anonymous song from the “Blundell Family Hodgepodge Book.”

‘More, I prithee, more’: Melancholy, Musical Appetite and Medical Discourse in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Iselin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

Pierre Iselin broaches the subject of early modern music and aims at contextualising Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most musical comedies, within the polyphony of discourses—medical, political, poetic, religious and otherwise—on appetite, music and melancholy, which circulated in early modern England. Iselin examines how these discourses interact with what the play says on music in the many commentaries contained in the dramatic text, and what music itself says in terms of the play’s poetics. Its abundant music is considered not only as ‘incidental,’ but as a sort of meta-commentary on the drama and the limits of comedy. Pinned against contemporary contexts, Twelfth Night is therefore regarded as experimenting with an aural perspective and as a play in which the genre and mode of the song, the identity and status of the addressee, and the more or less ironical distance that separates them, constantly interfere. Eventually, the author sees in this dark comedy framed by an initial and a final musical event a dramatic piece punctuated, orchestrated and eroticized by music, whose complex effects work both on the onstage and the offstage audiences. This reflection on listening and reception seems to herald an acoustic aesthetics close to that of The Tempest.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Modern Europe

There were few subjects that animated people in early modern Europe more than lying. The subject is endlessly represented and discussed in literature; treatises on rhetoric and courtiership; theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence; travel writing; pamphlets and news books; science and empirical observation; popular culture, especially books about strange, unexplained phenomena; and, of course, legal discourse. For many, lying could be controlled and limited even if not eradicated; for others, lying was a necessary element of a casuistical tradition, liars balancing complicated issues and short-term pragmatic considerations in the expectation of solving more problems than they caused through their deceit....

Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-82
Author(s):  
Nona Monahin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing

Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain verbal references to specific dances. Knowledge of early modern dance conventions can be of tremendous value in reading (and staging) these plays: “decoding” the dance references unveils layers of subtext that are relevant to an understanding of thematic issues and of the psychological makeup of characters, and it suggests visual ways in which scenes can be staged. This chapter examines dance references in Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night, focusing on the following dances: measure, cinquepace, galliard, coranto, and passy-measures pavan. Each dance is introduced through a brief review of extant choreographic sources, after which the references are examined in the context of the scene and dramatic situation in which they occur. Finally, approaches to staging the scene are considered, with the aim of making the dance references meaningful to audiences today.

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