Renaissance Drama, an annual and 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. Volume XXIV, "Perspectives on Renaissance Drama," includes essays that focus on a wide range of topics about the drama in England, France, and Italy, including female-female eroticism, women's silences in Renaissance texts, early Jacobean political tragedy, and virginity in John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis.

These essays bring attention to the designs that the English Renaissance playwrights imposed on their work. Among the patterns explored are those inspired by the literature, drama, or poetics of classical times and visual patterns derived from traditions of stage presentation.

Renaissance Drama, an annual publication, is devoted to understanding the drama as a central feature of Renaissance culture. Coverage, so far as subject matter is concerned, is not restricted to any single geographical area.

This anthology aligns feminist essays about Shakespeare with essays on other dramatists of the English Renaissance, particularly Peele, Marlowe, Webster, Marston, and Middleton. Foregrounding the intertextuality of Elizabethian drama, the thirteen essays_eleven of them new_explore the contribution of the stage to various feminist subjects, drawing on diverse theoretical approaches_formalists, materialist, historical, new historicist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, rhetorical_and resisting the figuration of feminist criticism as simple or univocal. Essayists include Laura Bromley, Mary Ann Bushman, Christy Desmet, Coppelia Kahn, Margaret Mikesell, Thomas Moisan, Jeanie Grant Moorem Phyllis Rackin, James Schiffer, Jeremy Tambling, Carolyn Whitney-Brown, and the editors. With extensive bibliographies.

How did English dramatists portray the neighboring domain of France and its history in their plays? The study examines a selection of Shakespearean and other history plays, the French tragedies of George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe's revealing historical tragedy The Massacre at Paris, and several literary and nonliterary historical texts. The result is a unique and timely contribution to our understanding of how cultural differences influenced the historical perspectives of English dramatists as well as how Renaissance plays shaped, and were shaped by, their historical material. Drawing on the insights of cultural studies, historiography, and ethnography, this study re-examines the historical representation of a neglected yet influential part of early modern Europe and the paradoxical relationship between English writers and their French subject matter. Although information about France and French history was becoming increasingly available in England at the end of the sixteenth century, for English writers France remained a distant land, its history and people misunderstood and misrepresented.

A public and highly popular literary form, English Renaissance drama affords a uniquely valuable index of the process of cultural transformation. The Expense of Spirit integrates feminist and historicist critical approaches to explore the dynamics of cultural conflict and change during a crucial period in the formation of modern sexual values. Comparing Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic representations of love and sexuality with those in contemporary moral tracts and religious writings on women, love, and marriage, Mary Beth Rose argues that such literature not only interpreted sexual sensibilities but also contributed to creating and transforming them.

A comparative study of the representation of sovereignty in paradigmatic plays of early modernity, The Tears of Sovereignty argues that the great playwrights of the period--William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca--reconstitute the metaphors through which contemporary theorists continue to conceive the problems of sovereignty. The book focuses in particular on the ways the logics of these metaphors inform sovereignty's conceptualization as a "body of power." Each chapter is organized around a key tropological operation performed on that "body," from the analogical relations invoked in Richard II, through the metaphorical transfers staged in Measure for Measure to the autoimmune resistances they produce in Lope's Fuenteovejuna, and, finally, the allegorical returns of Calderón's Life Is a Dream and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The "tears" of sovereignty are the exegetical tropes produced and performed on the English stages and Spanish corrales of the seventeenth century through which we continue to view sovereignty today.

The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has inspired interpretations in every genre and medium. This book offers perspectives on the ways in which practitioners have used Renaissance drama to address contemporary concerns and reach new audiences. It provides a resource for those interested in the creative reception of Renaissance drama.

Roston demonstrates that what emerges is not a fixed or monolithic pattern for each generation but a dynamic series of responses to shared challenges. The book relates leading English writers and literary modes to contemporary developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture, exploring by a close reading of the texts and the artistic works the insights such comparison offers. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: Gut, University of Bonn (Institut f r Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie), course: Revenge in the Renaissance, 9 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Sinister, unearthly, sometimes even all-knowing: Ghosts and metaphysical entities accompany stories, legends and and superstitious tales throughout the centuries. They are doomed as evil and satanic, or used to illustrate morality by "settling" their earthly bussiness with human evil-doers. They might even be good, yet can never completely to be trusted. Their connection with the dead makes them attractive as characters with powers above the human boundries. In the Elizabethan drama as in contrast to modern dramas, supernatural events and entities such as ghosts, apparitions, dreams and visions play a major and sometimes even crucial role in the plot. In this paper I would like to take a closer look at the Elizabethan fascination with the "unseen", how authors implemented it into their plays and what roles these ghosts and dreams played. Introductory I will look at the general view of the unnatrural from the Renaissance perspective. In order to stay within the proper range of this paper I have chosen a selection of four tragedies written by four different playwrights. In each of the plays, a ghostly character appears, mostly in dreamlike visions. I would like to discuss the scenes in which these characters appear and compare the characters with another in the conclusion of the paper.