Early Modern Drama at the Universities Institutions, Intertexts, Individuals

by Sandis, Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9780192857132
• ISBN10: 0192857134
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-10-31
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama in the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical experiences of students at university in early modern England and follows the students on the journey from schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace.
Early Modern Drama at the Universities is structured to make the subject as accessible as possible, mitigating the difficulties of this sizeable and complex body of evidence. The hundreds of plays that we have inherited from Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in Classical culture, and the academic
establishment's bias against print culture means that most evidence remains in manuscript form.

Opening up these plays to a wider readership, this study carves three main roads into the corpus, introducing key institutions, intertexts, and individuals. For the first time, we can see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it is: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and
self-reflexive. Early Modern Drama at the Universities argues that it was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked, and proved themselves to the community, and that if we are to understand university drama as a whole, we must create it from the building blocks of individual college
histories.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Sandis, Early Career Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Elizabeth Sandis is Early Career Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is a theatre historian specialising in Neo-Latin dramatic traditions of the early modern period. Trained as a Classicist, she then moved into English
studies to complete a doctorate at Merton College, Oxford, on the place of student drama in the culture of English university life, before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her articles have been published in Renaissance Drama,
Renaissance Studies, Early Theatre, The Seventeenth Century, and Shakespeare Survey.

Table of Contents

Introduction
PART I: INSTITUTIONS
1. Shared backgrounds and cultural pathways: from school to university
2. Young male bodies and a community in costume
PART II. INTERTEXTS
3. Scholar-soldiers take on Roman comedy: Role-playing as the miles glorious
4. From bitesize morsels to Thyestean feasts: The competitive world of Senecan revenge tragedy
PART III. INDIVIDUALS
5. Proof is in the performance: Dramatic overtures to patrons and employers
6. University drama in print: Curating your image and shaping your story
Epilogue: A Coming of Age