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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... writing , and to resituate discursive practices in relationship to the social and political institutions and processes of early modern England . It is my conviction that by focusing the analytical resources and techniques of literary ...
... writing , and to resituate discursive practices in relationship to the social and political institutions and processes of early modern England . It is my conviction that by focusing the analytical resources and techniques of literary ...
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... writing and reading of texts , as well as the processes by which they are circulated and categorized , ana- lyzed and taught , are now being construed as historically determined and determining modes of cultural work . What have often ...
... writing and reading of texts , as well as the processes by which they are circulated and categorized , ana- lyzed and taught , are now being construed as historically determined and determining modes of cultural work . What have often ...
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... writing , reading , and teaching as modes of action , and it is in this broad sense that its per- spective can be characterized as ideological . Traditionally , " ideology " has referred to the articulated principles serving as an ...
... writing , reading , and teaching as modes of action , and it is in this broad sense that its per- spective can be characterized as ideological . Traditionally , " ideology " has referred to the articulated principles serving as an ...
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... writers , performers , readers , and audiences to multiple and shifting positions within the world that they themselves both constitute and inhabit . In After the ... writing " universal history , " to be inscribing our Texts and Histories 3.
... writers , performers , readers , and audiences to multiple and shifting positions within the world that they themselves both constitute and inhabit . In After the ... writing " universal history , " to be inscribing our Texts and Histories 3.
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... Writing Culture : The Poetics and Politics of Ethnog- raphy , ed . James Clifford and George E. Marcus ( Berkeley : University of Califor- nia Press , 1986 ) ; Anthropology as Cultural Critique : An Experimental Moment in the ...
... Writing Culture : The Poetics and Politics of Ethnog- raphy , ed . James Clifford and George E. Marcus ( Berkeley : University of Califor- nia Press , 1986 ) ; Anthropology as Cultural Critique : An Experimental Moment in the ...
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