This guide has been created by the English liaison librarian in consultation with Professor Walter to support the readings and major assignment for this course about early modern drama and Shakespeare’ s contemporaries. See below links to other libguides that may be relevant to your studies:
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Prodigality in Early Modern Drama by
Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher. Why is it bad to spend too much money? In early modern England, the concept of prodigality governed all forms of financial excess and misuse, from gambling away your family estate to buying too much food. To be prodigal was not only to lack self-discipline but to be immorally excessive. Prodigals were foolish, reckless, and sinful, but their lives were also ones of excitement, lust, luxury, and intrigue. Ambivalently positioned between conservative financial ideals and increasingly popular economic indulgences, prodigals embodied a nation's anxieties about the advent of early capitalism. This book analyses the prodigal youth archetype in early modern drama, examining plays byShakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Randolph, Chapman, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Davenport, Gascoigne, Heywood, as well as anonymous works and morality plays. The theatres, which were so often criticised for financial excess, became the perfect setting for the rebellious exploits of prodigal youths, and their rises and falls were dramatised with increasing glamorisation between 1500 and 1642. By discussing humanist education practices, Aristotelian ethics, urban change, cuckoldry, usury, and sex work, the author offers the first examination of prodigality and the ways in which England at first condemned, then tolerated, and then eventually came to celebrate excessive spending. EZRA HORBURY is Lecturer in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature at the University of York.
Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama by
Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama explores textual representations of love and desire between female characters in a number of plays written between 1580 and 1660. The work argues that playwrights of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England recognized and constructed richly diverse tropes of female homoerotic desire. This book analyzes a significant body of dramatic texts, many identified for the first time, that reveal the way playwrights conceived of desire between women, including Philaster, Hymen's Triumph, The Lover's Melancholy, The Doubtful Heir, A Christian Turn'd Turk, Orgula, and others
Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama by
This book gives a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse, theatrically vital formal conventions of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Besides providing readings of plays such as Hamlet, Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, it also places Shakespeare emphatically within his own theatrical context, and focuses on the relationship between the demanding repertory system of the time and the conventions and content of the plays. Lopez argues that the limitations of the relatively bare stage and non-naturalistic mode of early modern theatre would have made the potential for failure very great, and he proposes that understanding this potential for failure is crucial for understanding the way in which the drama succeeded on stage. The book offers perspectives on familiar conventions such as the pun, the aside and the expository speech; and it works toward a definition of early modern theatrical genres based on the relationship between these well-known conventions and the incoherent experience of early modern theatrical narratives.
Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture by
"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." JSTOR
The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy by
"Shows how the ‘modern’ encounter with difficulty in the reading of revenge plays can be equivalent to an imaginative confrontation with the contradictions of ‘early modern’ theatrical action. Establishes a new approach to the relationship between historical performance and printed literature, and shows how the popular concept of ‘meta-theatre’ is inadequate. Reveals a dialectic of atavism and modernity in Renaissance revenge tragedy." JSTOR
Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 by 
Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage by
"This book discovers within early modern revenge tragedy the surprising shaping presence of a wide array of classical philosophies not commonly affiliated with the genre." JSTOR
