A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In this fortieth volume of Renaissance Drama, we pause again, not with the idea that we could define, or even describe, what might be, ought to be, or is included in the study of Renaissance drama (or if it is even always or ever the Renaissance, or the drama, that we study). But this does not even seem to have been what moved the first conversations that became "Research Opportunities" and Renaissance Drama. Rather, as they seem to have felt, we want to look at where we are and where our studies might lead us, and we too think we might as well make a beginning. For this issue, the editors invited a number of scholars working on different kinds of Renaissance drama, in a variety of ways and in several languages, to contribute brief essays addressing the state of the field of Renaissance drama, "the field" being convenient shorthand for the practical but productive indefinition under which we carry out our research and publish Renaissance Drama. In particular we asked them to consider these questions:
- How and with what effects has the study of Renaissance drama (or early modern performance) changed over the past half-century?
- What now is Renaissance drama? What could Renaissance drama become?
- What do you see as the most exciting (or least productive) development in the field?
- How have other developments in literary studies, performance studies, or other historical periods affected work in the field?
- What is missing from work in the field that it would be desirable to include or revive?
- Are there strategies you would propose for working through the divisions in the field based on national boundaries, between languages and traditions, or between canonical figures like Shakespeare, Molière, and other kinds of work? What kinds of distinctions do you see in the field? How are they useful or misleading?
- What new avenues in the field should open up further? Where should we look now?
- What is the most important work being done, or remaining to be done?
What if going to a play in Elizabethan England was more like attending a football match than a Broadway show—or playing in one? In Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion, William N. West proposes a new account of the kind of participatory entertainment expected by the actors and the audience during the careers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. West finds surprising descriptions of these theatrical experiences in the figurative language of early modern players and playgoers—including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting. Such words and ways of speaking are still in use today, but their earlier meanings, like that of theater itself, are subtly, importantly different from our own. Playing was not confined to the actors on the stage but filled the playhouse, embracing audiences and performers in collaborative experiences that did not belong to any one alone but to the assembled, various crowd. What emerged in playing was a kind of thinking and feeling distributed across persons and times that were otherwise distinct. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears—these and more gave verbal shape to the physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption.
Formal systems of comprehensive planning and performance-based management have a long if disappointing history in American government. This is illustrated most dramatically by the failure of program budgeting (PPB) in the 1960s and resurrection of that management technique in a handful of agencies over the past decade. Beyond its present application, the significance of PPB lies in its relationship to the goals and assumptions of popular reforms associated with the performance movement.
Program Budgeting and the Performance Movement examines PPB from its inception in the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara to its limited resurgence in recent years. It includes an in-depth case study of the adoption and effects of PPB at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The fact that program budgeting is subject to the same limitations today that led to its demise four decades ago speaks to the viability of requirements, such as those imposed by the Government Performance and Results Act, that are designed to make government more businesslike in its operations.
Renaissance Drama, an annual interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance.
This special issue of Renaissance Drama on "Italy in the Drama of Europe" primarily builds on the groundwork laid by Louise George Clubb, who showed that Italian drama was made in such a way as to facilitate its absorption and transformation into other traditions, even when it was not explicitly cited or referenced.
"Italy in the Drama of Europe" takes up the reverberations of early modern Italian drama in the theaters of Spain, England, and France and in writings in Italian, English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Latin, and German. Its scope is an example of the continuing force of and interest in one of the most rewarding, wide-ranging, and productive early modern aesthetic modes, and a tribute to the scholarship of Louise George Clubb, who, among others, recalled our attention to it.
Renaissance Drama, an annual interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore the traditional canon of drama, the significance of performance, broadly construed, to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance.
Volume 38 includes essays that explore topics in early modern drama ranging from Shakespeare’s Jewish questions in The Merchant of Venice and the gender of rhetoric in Shakespeare’s sonnets and Jonson’s plays to improvisation in the commedia dell’arte and the rebirth of tragedy in 1940 Germany.
Thinking about Shakespeare and secularization also involves thinking about how to interpret history and temporality in the contexts of Shakespeare’s medieval past, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, and the critical dispositions that define Shakespeare studies today. These essays reject a necessary opposition between “sacred” and “secular” and instead analyze how such categories intersect. In fresh analyses of plays ranging from Hamlet and The Tempest to All’s Well that Ends Well and All Is True, secularization emerges as an interpretive act that explores the cultural protocols of representation within both Shakespeare’s plays and the critical domains in which they are studied and taught.
The volume’s diverse disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches shift our focus from literal religion and doctrinal issues to such aspects of early modern culture as theatrical performance, geography, race, architecture, music, and the visual arts.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press