Shakespeare's Theater A Sourcebook

by Pollard, Tanya

• ISBN13: 9780470752975
• ISBN10: 0470752971
• Edition: 1st
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2008-01-14
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook brings together in one volume the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater.

• A collection of the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater.
  
• Includes attacks on the stage by moralists, defences by actors and playwrights, letters by magistrates, mayors and aldermen of London, and extracts from legislation.
  
• Demonstrates just how heated debates about the theater became in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
  
• A general introduction and short prefaces to each piece situate the writers and debates in the literary, social, political and religious history of the time.
  
• Brings together in one volume texts that would otherwise be hard to locate.
  
• Student-friendly - uses modern spelling and includes vocabulary glosses and annotation.

Author Biography

Tanya Pollard is Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Plates.

Acknowledgments.

Introduction.

Timeline.

Selected Bibliography.

Timeline of Theater History and Writings.

On works cited.

1. John Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes (1577).

2. Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (1579).

3. Stephen Gosson, Apology for the School of Abuse (1579).

4. Thomas Lodge, A Defense of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (1579).

5. Anglo-phile Eutheo [Anthony Munday], A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theaters (1580).

6. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582).

7. Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (1583).

8. William Rankins, A Mirror of Monsters (1587).

9. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie (London, 1589).

10. Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry (1595).

11. Thomas Beard, The Theater of God’s Judgments (1597).

12. John Rainolds, The Overthrow of Stage Plays (1599).

13. William Gager, Letter to Dr. John Rainolds (1592).

14. Henry Crosse, Virtue’s Commonwealth (1603).

15. Thomas Dekker, The Gull’s Horn Book (1609).

16. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612).

17. G. [John Greene], A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615).

18. Ben Jonson, Preface to Volpone (1616).

19. Nathan Field, Letter to Rev Mr. Sutton (1616).

20. William Prynne, Histriomastix: The Player’s Scourge (1633).

21. Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries (1641).

22. Legal acts and correspondences pertaining to the theater.

Index