Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350247057
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama by : David Hawkes

Download or read book Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama written by David Hawkes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public theatre was emerging – to great controversy – as the perfect medium to display, analyse and evaluate the newly autonomous power of representation in its financial, magical and aesthetic forms. Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama is especially timely in the current era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which are just as mysterious and occult in their operations as the germinal finance of 16th-century London. Chapters examine the convergence of money and magic in a wide range of early modern drama, from the anonymous Mankind through Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson, concentrating on such plays as The Alchemist, The New Inn and The Staple of News. Several focus on Shakespeare, whose analysis of the relations between finance, witchcraft and theatricality is particularly acute in Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale.

Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781350247079
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama by : David Hawkes

Download or read book Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama written by David Hawkes and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume considers three powerful ideological forces in early modern England: money, magic and the theatre. With the authorization of usury, financial value was developing into an independent, effective power. The mysterious, invisible nature of money's power struck many contemporaries as magical and contributed to the hysteria behind the great witch-hunts. At the same time, the public theatre emerged as a popular medium well-suited to representing the powers of magic. All the essays in this book examine the convergence of these three forces in a wide range of early modern drama. Part One considers the works of a broad array of figures ranging from Plautus through John Lyly to Christopher Marlowe - discussing plays such as Midas, The Alchemist and The Jew of Malta - while remaining tightly focussed on the nexus of money and magic. While Part Two concentrates on Shakespeare, whose diagnosis of the relations between finance, witchcraft and the stage is particularly acute in plays such as Timon of Athens, The Tempest and A Winter's Tale . The volume is especially timely in the current era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which often seem just as mysterious and occult in their operations as did the burgeoning financial system of sixteenth-century London."--

Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350247065
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama by : David Hawkes

Download or read book Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama written by David Hawkes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public theatre was emerging – to great controversy – as the perfect medium to display, analyse and evaluate the newly autonomous power of representation in its financial, magical and aesthetic forms. Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama is especially timely in the current era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which are just as mysterious and occult in their operations as the germinal finance of 16th-century London. Chapters examine the convergence of money and magic in a wide range of early modern drama, from the anonymous Mankind through Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson, concentrating on such plays as The Alchemist, The New Inn and The Staple of News. Several focus on Shakespeare, whose analysis of the relations between finance, witchcraft and theatricality is particularly acute in Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale.

Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350300470
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama by : Murat Ögütcü

Download or read book Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama written by Murat Ögütcü and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the popularity of plays about the East, the representation of the East in early modern drama has been either overlooked, marginalized as footnotes or generalized into stereotypes. Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama focuses on the multi-layered, often conflicting and changing perceptions of the East and how dramatic works made use of their respective theatrical space to represent the concept of the East in drama. This volume re-examines the (mis)representation of the East on the early modern English outdoor and indoor stage and broadens our understanding of early modern theatrical productions beyond Shakespeare and the European continent. It traces the origin of conventional depictions of the East to university dramas and explores how they influenced the commercial stage. Chapters uncover how conflicting representations of the East were communicated on stage through the material aspects of stage architecture, costumes and performance effects. The collection emphasizes these material aspects of dramatic performances and showcases neglected plays, including George Salterne's Tomumbeius, Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso and Joseph Simons' Leo the Armenian, and puts them in conversation with William Shakespeare's The Tempest and John Fletcher's The Island Princess.

Interruptions in Early Modern English Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350238325
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Interruptions in Early Modern English Drama by : Michael M. Wagoner

Download or read book Interruptions in Early Modern English Drama written by Michael M. Wagoner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To interrupt, both on stage and off, is to wrest power. From the Ghost's appearance in Hamlet to Celia's frightful speech in Volpone, interruptions are an overlooked linguistic and dramatic form that delineates the balance of power within a scene. This book analyses interruptions as a specific form in dramatic literature, arguing that these everyday occurrences, when transformed into aesthetic phenomena, reveal illuminating connections: between characters, between actor and audience, and between text and reader. Focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Fletcher, Michael M. Wagoner examines interruptions that occur through the use of punctuation and stage directions, as well as through larger forms, such as conventions and dramaturgy. He demonstrates how studying interruptions may indicate aspects of authorial style – emphasizing a playwright's use and control of a text – and how exploring relative power dynamics pushes readers and audiences to reconsider key plays and characters, providing new considerations of the relationships between Othello and Iago, or Macbeth and the Ghost of Banquo.

Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317290682
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama by : Nandini Das

Download or read book Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama written by Nandini Das and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351914022
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (519 download)

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Book Synopsis Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama by : Anthony Ellis

Download or read book Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama written by Anthony Ellis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first book-length study to trace the evolution of the comic old man in Italian and English Renaissance comedy shows how English dramatists adopted and reimagined an Italian model to reflect native concerns about and attitudes toward growing old. Anthony Ellis provides an in-depth study of the comic old man in the erudite comedy of sixteenth-century Florence; the character's parallel development in early modern Venice, including the commedia dell'arte; and, along with a consideration of Anglo-Italian intertextuality, the character's subsequent flourishing on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In outlining the character's development, Ellis identifies and describes the physical and behavioral characteristics of the comic old man and situates these traits within early modern society by considering prevailing medical theories, sexual myths, and intergenerational conflict over political and economic circumstances. The plays examined include Italian dramas by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Niccolò Machiavelli, Donato Giannotti, Lorenzino de' Medici, Andrea Calmo, and Flaminio Scala, and English works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker, along with Middleton, Rowley, and Heywood's The Old Law. Besides providing insight into stage representations of aging, this book illuminates how early modern people conceived of and responded to the experience of growing old and its social, economic, and physical challenges.

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134783043
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (347 download)

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Book Synopsis Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama by : Natasha Korda

Download or read book Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama written by Natasha Korda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-11 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 1409478378
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (94 download)

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Book Synopsis Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama by : Dr Michelle M Dowd

Download or read book Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama written by Dr Michelle M Dowd and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.

Notelets of Filth

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000828360
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Notelets of Filth by : Laura Kressly

Download or read book Notelets of Filth written by Laura Kressly and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of short, accessible essays serves as a supplementary text to Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play, Emilia. Critically acclaimed and beloved by audiences, this innovative and ground-breaking show is a speculative history, an imaginative (re)telling of the life of English Renaissance poet Aemilia Bassano Lanyer. This book features essays by theatre practitioners, activists, and scholars and informed by intersectional feminist, critical race, queer, and postcolonial analyses will enable students and their teachers across secondary school and higher education to consider the play’s major themes from a wide variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives. This volume explores the current events and cultural contexts that informed the writing and performing of Emilia between 2017 and 2019, various aspects of the professional London productions, critical and audience responses, and best practices for teaching the play to university and secondary school students. It includes a foreword by Emilia playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, arts activism, feminist literature, and theory.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781315593197
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (931 download)

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Book Synopsis Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage by : Lisa Hopkins

Download or read book Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Medieval & Renaissance Literar
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 1100 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama by : Ian McAdam

Download or read book Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama written by Ian McAdam and published by Medieval & Renaissance Literar. This book was released on 2009 with total page 1100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The prevalent worldview of early modern England, shaped by Protestantism, dismissed magical belief as an ideological delusion inherent to Catholicism, while also encouraging a strong sense of individualism, through which a new masculinity found expression. This study asks why, then, did magical self-empowerment retain such a hold on that society's imagination?"--Provided by publisher.

Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317152026
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama by : Brian Sheerin

Download or read book Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama written by Brian Sheerin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama traces the near-simultaneous rise of economic theory, literary criticism, and public theater in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, and posits that connecting all three is a fascination with creating something out of nothing simply by acting as if it were there. Author Brian Sheerin contends that the motivating force behind both literary and economic inquiry at this time was the same basic quandary about the human imagination--specifically, how investments of belief can produce tangible consequences. Just as speculators were realizing the potency of collective imagination on economic circulation, readers and dramatists were becoming newly introspective about whether or not the 'lies' of literature could actually be morally 'profitable.' Could one actually benefit by taking certain fictions 'seriously'? Each of the five chapters examines a different dimension of this question by highlighting a particular dramatization of economic trust on the Renaissance stage, in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, and Jonson. The book fills a gap in current scholarship by keeping economic and dramatic interests rigorously grounded in early modern literary criticism, but also by emphasizing the productive nature of debt in a way that resonates with recent economic sociology.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

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Author :
Publisher : Lund Humphries Publishers
ISBN 13 : 9781472432872
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (328 download)

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Book Synopsis Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage by : Lisa Hopkins

Download or read book Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Lund Humphries Publishers. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering a variety of questions centering on magic and, or in, performance, this volume furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. Collectively the essays show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects and subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to effect transformation in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.

Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture

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Author :
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1837641587
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (376 download)

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Book Synopsis Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture by : Ryan Curtis Friesen

Download or read book Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture written by Ryan Curtis Friesen and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brings together authors of fiction with philosophers and academics in Early Modern England and compares their ways of describing and understanding the world; Explores popular culture as well as the culture of the learned and elite; Examines the intellectual consequences of the Reformation and compares the spiritual and doctrinal practices of the occult to those of orthodoxy. Magic and the supernatural are common themes in the philosophy and fiction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture explores varieties of scepticism and belief exhibited by a selection of philosophers and playwrights, including Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton, explicating how each author defines the supernatural, whether he assumes magic to operate in the world, and how he uses occult principles to explain what can be known and what is ethical. Beliefs and claims concerning impossible phenomena and superhuman agency require literary historians to determine whether an occult system of magical operation is being described in a given text. Each chapter in this volume evaluates whether a chosen early modern author is endorsing magic as efficacious or divinely sanctioned, or criticizing it for being fraudulent or unholy. By examining works of fiction, it is possible to explore fantastic settings which were not intended to be synonymous with the early modern audiences everyday experience, settings where magic exists and operates according to the playwrights designs. This book also sets out to determine what historical sources provided given authors with knowledge of the occult and speculates on how aware an audience would have been of academic, classical, or popular contexts surrounding the text at hand.

Economies of Early Modern Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192692224
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Economies of Early Modern Drama by : Anne Enderwitz

Download or read book Economies of Early Modern Drama written by Anne Enderwitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides new insights into how theatre responded to changing economic practices and structures. It reviews discourses on household management and commerce to create a rich context for the discussion of socio-economic actions and transactions in Macbeth, Othello, and Timon of Athens, as well as in city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. By approaching discourses on economy and commerce as complementary, the book opens up a diverse field of socio-economic practices, including the gendered division of duties in the household, new modes of valuation, and evolving credit instruments. Theatre provides unique access to this field. In contrast to practical and policy-oriented discourses, it addresses socio-economic change and its vicissitudes in a spirit of experimentation, testing the ethical limits of socio-economic action and accustoming audiences to the demands of a changing socio-economic reality. Theatre thus offers a vital contribution to the prehistory of political economy. On the London stages, self-interest emerges as a key motive of socio-economic action, and theatre playfully explores its ambiguous status as a partly rational and partly excessive force that has a new ordering function but also creates social conflict. At the same time, by staging the contradictory demands of ethics and efficiency in economic decision-making, early modern plays offer access to a changing understanding of prudence that has a Machiavellian touch: by aligning with the pursuit of private interest, prudence sheds some of its ethical content and becomes foremost an instrumental faculty.

Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317152018
Total Pages : 175 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama by : Brian Sheerin

Download or read book Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama written by Brian Sheerin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama traces the near-simultaneous rise of economic theory, literary criticism, and public theater in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, and posits that connecting all three is a fascination with creating something out of nothing simply by acting as if it were there. Author Brian Sheerin contends that the motivating force behind both literary and economic inquiry at this time was the same basic quandary about the human imagination--specifically, how investments of belief can produce tangible consequences. Just as speculators were realizing the potency of collective imagination on economic circulation, readers and dramatists were becoming newly introspective about whether or not the 'lies' of literature could actually be morally 'profitable.' Could one actually benefit by taking certain fictions 'seriously'? Each of the five chapters examines a different dimension of this question by highlighting a particular dramatization of economic trust on the Renaissance stage, in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, and Jonson. The book fills a gap in current scholarship by keeping economic and dramatic interests rigorously grounded in early modern literary criticism, but also by emphasizing the productive nature of debt in a way that resonates with recent economic sociology.