The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan TheatrePart of a larger project to examine the Elizabethan politics of representation, Louis Montrose's The Purpose of Playing refigures the social and cultural context within which Elizabethan drama was created. Montrose first locates the public and professional theater within the ideological and material framework of Elizabethan culture. He considers the role of the professional theater and theatricality in the cultural transformation that was concurrent with religious and socio-political change, and then concentrates upon the formal means by which Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays called into question the absolutist assertions of the Elizabethan state. Drawing dramatic examples from the genres of tragedy and history, Montrose finally focuses his cultural-historical perspective on A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Purpose of Playing elegantly demonstrates how language and literary imagination shape cultural value, belief, and understanding; social distinction and interaction; and political control and contestation. |
From inside the book
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... particular play , A Midsummer Night's Dream , at the same time drawing in discussion of many other relevant cultural texts . Here the relationship between the theatre and the state is figured , in part , through the play's reworkings of ...
... particular play , A Midsummer Night's Dream , at the same time drawing in discussion of many other relevant cultural texts . Here the relationship between the theatre and the state is figured , in part , through the play's reworkings of ...
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... particular attention to the discourse of gender that circulated through Elizabethan culture , and to its imaginative and conspicuous articula- tion in A Midsummer Night's Dream . I construe this discourse as recip- rocally related to ...
... particular attention to the discourse of gender that circulated through Elizabethan culture , and to its imaginative and conspicuous articula- tion in A Midsummer Night's Dream . I construe this discourse as recip- rocally related to ...
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... particular sociopolitical movement or group , or , more generally , to the congeries of ideas , values , and beliefs common to any social group . In recent years , this vexed but indispensable term has in its broadest sense come to be ...
... particular sociopolitical movement or group , or , more generally , to the congeries of ideas , values , and beliefs common to any social group . In recent years , this vexed but indispensable term has in its broadest sense come to be ...
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... particular development , and that other process in which a subsequent content is essentially prefigured , predicted and controlled by a pre - existing external force . Yet it is fair to say , looking at many applications of Marx- ist ...
... particular development , and that other process in which a subsequent content is essentially prefigured , predicted and controlled by a pre - existing external force . Yet it is fair to say , looking at many applications of Marx- ist ...
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... particular no- tion , formulation , or action but also the historical and social specificity of its subsequent representations — that is , the context of articulation ( or , following Tony Bennett , what we might also call the reading ...
... particular no- tion , formulation , or action but also the historical and social specificity of its subsequent representations — that is , the context of articulation ( or , following Tony Bennett , what we might also call the reading ...
Contents
The Reformation of Playing | 19 |
A Theatre of Changes | 30 |
Anatomies of Playing | 41 |
The Theatre the City and the Crowns | 53 |
From the Stage to the State | 66 |
The Power of Personation | 76 |
The CrossPurposes of Playing | 99 |
THE SHAPING FANTASIES OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM | 107 |
Common terms and phrases
actors Amazons Andrew Gurr articulation artisans audience authority Bottom Bottom's Dream Chambers civic comedy comic commercial theatre construed context Corpus Christi Corpus Christi play court courtly critical Cynthia discourse dominant drama Earl Early Modern England Elizabe Elizabethan culture Elizabethan Stage Elizabethan theatre Endimion English entertainments Essex fantasy forms gender Globe Greenblatt Hamlet hath Henry Hermia Hippolyta Hippolytus ideological King late Elizabethan literary London Lord Chamberlain's Lord Chamberlain's Men Majestie marriage masculine material metatheatrical Midsummer Night's Dream modes mother Oberon Oxford patriarchal performance perspective play's playes playhouse playwright political popular practice Prince printed Privy Council professional players professional theatre public theatre purpose of playing quarto Queen Elizabeth quotation relationship Renaissance representation Revels Richard Richard II royal sexual Shakespeare's Shakespeare's play social society speare's Stephen Greenblatt Stephen Orgel structure studies subjects subversion suggest theatrical Theseus Theseus's tion Titania traditional Tudor women