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   Book Info

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Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleto, and the Making of Theatrical Value  
Author: Paul Edward Yachnin
ISBN: 0812233956
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review
Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleto, and the Making of Theatrical Value

FROM THE PUBLISHER

To many of their contemporaries, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were little more than artisanal craftsmen, "stage-wrights" who wrote plays for money, to be performed in common play-houses and in a manner of the antithetical to what Jonson himself viewed as the higher calling of poetry. In response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism, Paul Yachnin contends, players and dramatists alike had promulgated the idea of drama's irrelevance, creating a recreational theater that failed to influence its audience in any purposeful way. In Stage-Wrights Yachnin shows how Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton struggled to reclaim not only the importance of their art, but their own social legitimacy as well through the reshaping of the commercial theater. His bold readings of their works unveil the strategies by which they sought power from their privileged but powerless position on the margins. Adopting a hermeneutical approach, he explores a wide range of historical evidence to describe how English Renaissance drama depicted the world in ways refracted by the interests of the playing companies; throughout, he challenges recent historicist models that have overrated the importance of dramatic productions to society and its institutions of authority.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

A defense of the three Renaissance playwrights against the criticism of their contemporaries, who suggested that their work was motivated by money, rather than by a need to influence the audience in any purposeful way. The author contends that players and dramatists of the period had promulgated the idea of drama's irrelevance, and that Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton struggled to reclaim the importance of their art, and their own social legitimacy through the reshaping of the commercial theater. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

     



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