Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance

Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance
Author :
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Total Pages : 217
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781609383626
ISBN-13 : 1609383621
Rating : 4/5 (26 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance by : Robert Henke

Download or read book Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance written by Robert Henke and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre and Performance takes a transnational approach, which reveals a greater range of attitudes and charitable practices regarding the poor than state poor laws and rogue books suggest. Close study of German and Latin beggar catalogues, popular songs performed in Italian piazzas, the Paduan actor-playwright Ruzante, the commedia dell’arte in both Italy and France, and Shakespeare demonstrate how early modern theatre and performance could reveal the gap between official policy and actual practices regarding the poor. The actor-based theatre and performance traditions examined in this study, which persistently explore felt connections between the itinerant actor and the vagabond beggar, evoke the poor through complex and variegated forms of imagination, thought, and feeling. Early modern theatre does not simply reflect the social ills of hunger, poverty, and degradation, but works them through the forms of poverty, involving displacement, condensation, exaggeration, projection, fictionalization, and marginalization. As the critical mass of medieval charity was put into question, the beggar-almsgiver encounter became more like a performance. But it was not a performance whose script was prewritten as the inevitable exposure of the dissembling beggar. Just as people’s attitudes toward the poor could rapidly change from skepticism to sympathy during famines and times of acute need, fictions of performance such as Edgar’s dazzling impersonation of a mad beggar in Shakespeare’s King Lear could prompt responses of sympathy and even radical calls for economic redistribution.


Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance Related Books

Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance
Language: en
Pages: 217
Authors: Robert Henke
Categories: Performing Arts
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-08-01 - Publisher: University of Iowa Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre an
Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance
Language: en
Pages: 217
Authors: Robert Henke
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-08 - Publisher: University of Iowa Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre an
Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama
Language: en
Pages: 252
Authors: Lindsey Row-Heyveld
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-08-07 - Publisher: Springer

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? This book uncovers a previously unexamined theatrical tradition and explores the
Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater
Language: en
Pages: 376
Authors: Robert Henke
Categories: Performing Arts
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-02-24 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The essays in this volume investigate English, Italian, Spanish, German, Czech, and Bengali early modern theater, placing Shakespeare and his contemporaries in
A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age
Language: en
Pages: 281
Authors: Robert Henke
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-08-08 - Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For both producers and consumers of theatre in the early modern era, art was viewed as a social rather than an individual activity. Emerging in the context of n