Staging Playing Pyrotechnics And Magic Conventions Of Performance In Early English Theatre
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Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre
In this selection of research articles Butterworth focuses on investigation of the practical and technical means by which early English theatre, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, was performed. Matters of staging for both 'pageant vehicle' and 'theatre-in-the-round' are described and analysed to consider their impact on playing by players, expositors, narrators and prompters. All these operators also functioned to promote the closely aligned disciplines of pyrotechnics and magic (legerdemain or sleight of hand) which also influence the nature of the presented theatre. The sixteen chapters form four clearly identified parts—staging, playing, pyrotechnics and magic—and drawing on a wealth of primary source material, Butterworth encourages the reader to rediscover and reappreciate the actors, magicians, wainwrights and wheelwrights, pyrotechnists, and (in modern terms) the special effects people and event managers who brought these early texts to theatrical life on busy city streets and across open arenas. The chapters variously explore and analyse the important backwaters of material culture that enabled, facilitated and shaped performance yet have received scant scholarly attention. It is here, among the itemised payments to carpenters and chemists, the noted requirements of mechanics and wheelwrights, or tucked away among the marginalia of suppliers of staging and ingenious devices that Butterworth has made his stamping ground. This is a fascinating introduction to the very ‘nuts and bolts’ of early theatre. Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre is a closely argued celebration of stagecraft that will appeal to academics and students of performance, theatre history and medieval studies as well as history and literature more broadly. It constitutes the eighth volume in the Routledge series Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies and continues the valuable work of that series (of which Butterworth is a general editor) in bringing significant and expert research articles to a wider audience. (CS 1105).
Theatre and its Audiences
Author: Kate Craddock
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2024-01-25
Written in the aftermath of the Covid crisis, this book brings the past, present and future of theatre-going together as it explores the nature of the relationships between performance practitioners, arts organisations and their audiences. Proposing that the pandemic forced a re-evaluation of what it means to be an audience, and combining historical and current cultural sector perspectives, the book reflects on how historical conventions have conditioned present day expectations of theatre-going in the UK. Helen Freshwater examines the ways in which developments in technology, architecture and forms of communication have influenced what is expected by and of audiences, reflecting changes in theatre's cultural status and place in our lives. Drawing on the first-hand experiences of festival director and performance practitioner Kate Craddock, it also contends that practitioners now need to turn their attention to care, access and sustainability, arguing that the pandemic taught us, above all, that it is possible to do things differently. Part vision, part provocation, part critical interrogation, Theatre and its Audiences offers an insightful appraisal of past norms and assumptions to set out a bold argument about where we should go from here.
Aspects of War in the Late Middle Ages
Author: Christopher Allmand
language: en
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Release Date: 2022-06-30
This Variorum collection of articles is intended to illustrate that conflict in the late Middle Ages was not only about soldiers and fighting (about the makers and the making of war), important as these were. Just as it remains in our own day, war was a subject which attracted writers (commentators, moralists and social critics among them), some of whom glorified war, while others did not. For the historian the written word is important evidence of how war, and those taking part in it, might be regarded by the wider society. One question was supremely important: what was the standing among their contemporaries of those who fought society’s wars? How was war seen on the moral scale of the time? The last two sections deal with a particular war, the ‘occupation’ of northern France by the English between 1420 and 1450. The men who conquered the duchy, and then served to keep it under English control for those years, had to be rewarded with lands, titles, administrative and military responsibilities, even (for the clergy) ecclesiastical benefices. For these, war spelt ‘opportunity’, whose advantages they would be reluctant to surrender. The final irony lies in the fact that Frenchmen, returning to claim their ancestral rights once the English had been driven out, frequently found it difficult to unravel both the legal and the practical consequences of a war which had caused a considerable upheaval in Norman society over a period of a single generation. (CS 1106).