Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (review)

2001 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-154
Author(s):  
Arthur F. Kinney
2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 823
Author(s):  
Rebecca Wood ◽  
Kent Cartwright

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (261) ◽  
pp. 184-203
Author(s):  
Jessica Winston

Abstract This article surveys the modern reception of the first English tragedy Gorboduc, first reviewing references to Gorboduc in popular print and literature and then in performance. For a long time in the popular press, the play formed part of a framework of cultural knowledge that educated people were assumed to have or desire. Productions of Gorboduc grew out of that context. Implicitly hearkening back to the Renaissance ethos of ‘teach and delight’, they offered audiences an appealing way to reinforce their awareness of English drama. Beyond this dominant trend in the play’s reception, Gorboduc has circulated in another way – as a work that not only represents the past but which also speaks to contemporary times. While the play once represented general information that educated people ought to know, clearly this is no longer the case. Considering this fact, this article suggests that it is possible to rehabilitate the play by building on presentist understandings of the play already present in its modern reception in popular print and performance – that is, to emphasise why Gorboduc continues to be relevant by more explicitly framing it and other Tudor plays in relation to topics that dominate the sixteenth century and matter now, such as tyranny, counsel, and territorial disunion.


Author(s):  
Doyeeta Majumder

Through a discussion of three early Tudor morality plays which foreground the figure of the tyrant, this chapter argues that, though early sixteenth-century English drama engages deeply with issues of tyranny and misuse of sovereign power, these plays are not concerned with the issue of usurpation. The nature or origins of sovereignty itself are not scrutinized in these plays. The ‘good king-bad tyrant’ conflict that is the central agon of later plays which pit the legitimate monarch against the usurper, is effaced as the good king himself transforms into the bad tyrant.


PMLA ◽  
1918 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-268
Author(s):  
David Klein

In the winter of 1567–8 five gentlemen of the Inner Temple presented befor the queen a tragedy entitled Gismond of Salerne. In 1591–2 Robert Wilmot, author of the fifth act, publisht a revision of the entire work under the name Tancred and Gismund. This was reprinted by Dodsley. The erlier version has cum down to us in two ms. copies, both in the British Museum: Hargrave 205, knoen as H, and Landsdowne 786, knoen as L, the former dating from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the latter from the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century. L has been reprinted by Brandl in volume LXXX of Quellen und Forschungen and by Cunliffe in his Early English Classical Tragedies. Renewed study of the work finds a stimulus in the recent publication of a fotografic reproduction of H in Farmer's facsimile edition of The Old English Drama.


PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 325-335
Author(s):  
Marjorie L. Reyburn

Students of English drama have long been interested in the Parnassus trilogy, produced in St. John's College, Cambridge, at the turn of the sixteenth century. The third play, The Reiurne from Parnassus, or The Scourge of Simony, was the only one published contemporaneously. Since the Reverend W. D. Macray's edition of the entire series in 1886, following his discovery in the Bodleian of a manuscript copy of the long-lost first two plays, the trilogy has been acclaimed as “the most brilliant product of the Tudor university stage.” Successive scholars have analyzed its sources, argued the problems of its authorship and dating, and variously interpreted its personal satire and allusion. Still unsolved, however, is the problem of authorship; still uncertain the answer to a famous crux in Shakespearean scholarship—the identification of Shakespeare's “purge” of Jonson, alluded to in the third play. It is the purpose of this paper (1) to introduce a new name in connection with the authorship of the trilogy; (2) by means of previously unused internal evidence to establish beyond any possibility of doubt J. B. Leishman's well-reasoned, but nevertheless inconclusive, identification of the “purge” with Dekker's Satiro-Mastix, despite the Parnassus poet's attribution of it to Shakespeare; and (3) to use this same internal evidence to reveal the Cambridge playwright's hitherto unsuspected satire of Jonson.


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