The History Plays of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2025)

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Victorian Writers and the Stage: The Plays of Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson

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A study of the professionally produced plays by four major Victorian writers, set against the context of the battle between the Major and Minor theatres over the legitimacy of popular dramatic forms. Given the potential threat to authorial reputation, the book asks, why did these writers choose to embark on dramatic careers?

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Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, ed. Victorian Shakespeare: Volume I, Theatre, Drama, and Performance, Volume II, Literature and Culture, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. £50.00 per volume. ISBN 1-4039-1116-9, 1-4039-1117-7

Richard Cave

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Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation, and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad (review)

David Ian Rabey

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“Works, not Playes”: Print, Reformatory Theatre and the Privileging of Jonson over Shakespeare in 1640s and 1650s Britain

Chris Orchard

Shakespeare, 2016

Mark Robson has commented that "in critical terms the 'and' in 'Jonson and Shakespeare' indicates not equivalence but co-dependency. Jonson may always be defined by a certain vision of Shakespeare, but that 'Shakespeare' is itself the product of a comparison with Jonson". While this may be true when considering the historical and critical discourse of this relational axis, it is the contention of this essay that there was no co-dependency in the 1640s and 1650s. First, the move towards the printing of plays of select playwrights benefited Jonson more than Shakespeare. Literary filiations connected him with the works of his "sons", whose works, printed after his death, brought to mind Jonson's comparative mastery over any of them and kept Jonson in the spotlight. Second, which plays were selected for publication or were talked about became equally important because they determined how writers were read politically. If Jonson's Sejanus or Cataline was praised for its astute insights into leadership models for Royalist political figures in the 1650s, the publication of Shakespeare's King Lear or The Rape of Lucrece in the same decade could be read as damning critique of the abdication of Royalist authority in the 1640s. Because the political voices of Royalist writers tended to dominate discourses about plays, their conservative vision about the positive connection between the monarchy and drama meant their sympathy was drawn towards playwrights who shared those sentiments. Jonson's political affiliation with monarchy was more in tune with their ideological position than Shakespeare's more sceptical analysis. Third, Jonson benefited from political change. In the 1650s the apparent consolidation of republican power under Cromwell's leadership led formerly Royalist writers to abandon their insistence on the correlation between drama and the monarchy. They pitched Jonson's plays and their "moral sense" as the ideal model for a reformatory theatre that would find acceptance in a new administration. In addition, because Jonson himself renamed his plays as works, writers in the 1650s argued that he had predicted their own strategic position on drama. The consequence of these factors was the pervasive visibility of Jonson and the relative invisibility of Shakespeare.

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'Guides Not Commanders': Imitation and Contamination of the Classics in the Comedies of Ben Jonson.

Tom Harrison

2017

This study focuses on the influence of classical authors on Ben Jonson’s dramaturgy, with particular emphasis on the playwrights Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence, and the literary satirists Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucian. Jonson was a man of the theatre just as much as he was a man of letters, and in order to illuminate this aspect of his creative personality the thesis considers how classical performance elements (including the Aristophanic ‘Great Idea,’ chorus, and Terentian/Plautine performative strategies) as well as ‘performative’ elements from classical literature (such as the presentation of satirical personae) manifest themselves in the staging of his plays. The emphasis on performance helps to steer the thesis away from focusing purely on classical literary allusions within Jonson's playtexts, and instead encompasses non-literary elements like theatregrams, modes of performance, spatial practices, and structural techniques that are not necessarily apparent on the page but are key elements of Jonson's dramaturgy. The thesis contends that, in performative just as much as literary terms, Jonson's appropriation of the classics fits with the creative techniques of imitatio and contaminatio, two practices that placed emphasis on the modelling of literary or dramatic works on the examples of past writers and of the creative blending of these models to produce a new aesthetic object. In addition, it is argued that the moral imperatives that drive Jonson's dramatic output are also a product of both of these creative practices, imbuing it with a blend of Greek and Roman dramaturgical and philosophical viewpoints that create a uniquely Jonsonian dramaturgy that is, in varying combinations, moralising, aggressive, sympathetic, and cynical. The study proceeds thematically rather than chronologically, and makes use of critical methods and scholarship from a range of disciplines, including performance and comparativist criticism, English philology, classical studies, spatial theory, and reception studies. The whole thesis is unified by its emphasis on Jonson’s imitative and contaminative strategies, which serve as useful conceptual models for examining how he allowed his classical sources to become ‘guides, not commanders,’ their influence giving his work the curious quality of being simultaneously deeply indebted to the ancient authors and playwrights while never being completely beholden to them. An appendix on all classical allusions in Jonson's comedies as documented by the plays' recent major editors and an appendix detailing the extant records of classical performances c.1450-1650 conclude the thesis.

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‘Shakespeare in Drama’, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Tiffany Stern

This chapter is about the homage routinely paid to Shakespeare by dramatists and performers, and their ignorance of his actual works. It shows that Shakespeare’s plays were known best in their adapted Restoration forms; they were then further altered; and it was already-altered seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Shakespeare plays that provided characters, plot moments, and ‘beauties’ to be threaded through subsequent adaptations and, occasionally, imitations. Much of Shakespeare’s popularity, indeed, rested on the extent to which he had already been altered and was thus available for further alteration – his texts were seen as fundamentally unfixed and so free for remoulding and reshaping. Shakespeare was, then, assimilated through the process of adapting his adaptations: his staged works were always current, and that was because they were always substantially eighteenth-century. Though Shakespeare’s characterisation and storylines were regularly extracted for ‘popular’ theatre and puppet entertainments, his plays as a whole were relegated; only particular word-conscious ‘literary’ productions staged Shakespeare's plays in full at all. Even then, however, the playwright’s language and sentiments were updated to fit eighteenth-century mores and his stories were reduced to leave room for exciting new eighteenth-century entertainments. As all Shakespeare was adapted Shakespeare, a habit built up of staging a fictional version of Shakespeare the man to sanction the alterations of his plays. From this it was only a small step before the ‘Shakespeare’ character started to thrive in his own right on the eighteenth-century stage: extending beyond plays actually by the bard, ‘Shakespeare’ began authorizing other plays by other people. Thus both Shakespeare’s works, and ‘Shakespeare’ represent the way the eighteenth-century was able to tame and regularise its past and shape it to the present; what affected eighteenth-century dramatists was not actual Shakespeare but the works and person that they were able to make him be.

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Plays, 1598-1603

Eleanor Lowe

2018

The chapter begins by marking out the boundaries of ‘early Jonson’ with reference to theatre history and bibliography, before providing recorded responses to Jonson in the contemporary theatre. It identifies 1597 as a key year in his dramatic development, particularly pointing to the influence of George Chapman on Jonson’s playwriting and on popular London theatre more generally. The Case Is Altered, Jonson’s first extant performed play, is analysed in detail, with special attention paid to his presentation of households on the stage (the carefully delineated status of the steward, his lord, and other servants), and integral use of properties, costume and objects in stage business. The conclusion points to Jonson’s skill in crafting little worlds within the theatre, and in bringing London onto the stage

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"A Divided Mind": On Tennyson and the Social Role of the Poet in Victorian England

David Single

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Reading Shakespeare in the context of his own time

Zerin Alam

2010

This paper is an attempt to study Shakespeare in the context of his own age. Drawing on critical research in New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, I have attempted to show how the social practices of Elizabethan Age influence the plays. The prevalence of themes relating to politics and finances in the plays are a reflection of the contemporary social issues. I discuss how power and money are represented in Shakespeare‘s plays as well as the way the playwright himself dealt with these two forces. Shakespeare had to negotiate between the rules imposed upon him, by political power and economic necessity, and his desire for artistic autonomy , and this position is inscribed in his plays. Shakespeare, according to Ben Jonson, ―was not of an age, but for all time (l43)‖ 1 . The Shakespearean critic Jan Kott called h im ―Our contemporary‖ in the book by the same name 2 . More recently Shakespeare has become the Man of the Millennium in a BBC poll 3 , winning over scientists and politic...

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Reprints and Revivals (seminar at Shakespeare Association of America in New Orleans, 23-26 March 2016); led by Eoin Price and Harry Newman

Harry Newman, Eoin Price

Shakespeare Association of America, New Orleans, 2016

Early modern drama studies tends to privilege first performances and publications, but reprints and revivals are essential to how we understand plays by Shakespeare and other dramatists as theatre historians and literary critics. Reprints and revivals might include new material, sometimes by new authors, which can vastly alter the way a play works, such as the painter scene in The Spanish Tragedy. The cultural climate of reprints and revivals might affect the way in which a play was received and understood. What might it have meant, for example, to see a performance of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in the 1620s, Marston’s The Malcontent in the 1630s, or even to read the 1655 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King during the Interregnum? Revivals might involve a change of playhouse, theatre company, and repertory, and reprints a change of printing-house, publisher and printer, all of which were targeting new audiences and new readers. When Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle was first performed at Blackfriars by the Children of the Queen’s Revels, it was reputed to be a failure. In the 1613 first Quarto the publisher, Walter Burre, famously quipped that the audience failed to grasp its ‘priuy marke of Ironie’. However, when the play was next printed in 1635 by a different publisher, it bore the mark of an ostensibly successful revival by Queen Henrietta’s Men at the Phoenix on Drury Lane. What had changed? This seminar will explore the ways in which playwrights, acting companies and stationers renewed plays in early modern England, inviting papers on reprints, revivals and/or the relationship between them. The seminar will address a variety of questions. How do printed paratexts (e.g. commendatory verses, prefatory epistles, dedications) and theatrical paratexts (e.g. inductions, prologues, epilogues) represent and conceptualise new publications and new performances? How do we know when a play is revived? Do reprints and revivals of certain plays coincide, and if so, how is this significant? How do revivals complicate our understanding of repertory? How is the relationship between first and later performances/publications influenced by cultural and social shifts?

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The History Plays of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2025)

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