Spa Culture and Literature in Early Modern England, 1500-1800 ed. Sophie Chiari and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 89-116, 2021
This chapter is on the legend of King Bladud, ‘maker’ of the baths of Bath. It is in two parts. P... more This chapter is on the legend of King Bladud, ‘maker’ of the baths of Bath. It is in two parts. Part one tells the tale of Bladud, as first related by Monmouth in the eleventh century, up until now, showing the changes and permutations it underwent over time. Part two tells the story of Bath over the same period, revealing how Bladud’s founding myth was reconceived whenever beliefs about the hot water changed. Both parts consider what an unfixed foundation mythology reveals about its spa city. To what extent has Bladud's story shaped Bath and its baths, and to what extent has Bath and its baths shaped what is, in more than one sense, the fluid tale of Bladud?
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Papers by Tiffany Stern
about the connection between ‘Players’ and ‘Ballad-Mungers’ –
traders of ballads – and their products. ‘Our merry Ballads, and
lascivious Playes / Are much alike’, he maintained; ‘T’one sings;
the other sayes; / And both are Fripp’ries of anothers Froth’.
According to Quarles, then, not only are plays and ballads
closely connected: each is the flourish on the other.1 Plays and
ballads, implies Quarles, at the least require one another; and
perhaps even, sometimes, bring one another about.
This lecture is about interrelationships between ballads and
plays; frippery and froth. It is in three parts. The first considers
ballads used, and sometimes authored, by two representative
playwrights, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare.
The second part is on the ballad-jigs and ballad-‘themes’ performed
when plays were over, promoted and maybe authored
by clowns. The third concerns the place where theatre ballads
were sold and by whom: outside playhouses and by ‘outsiders’
from society. And, as the ballads ‘outside’ plays seem to have
consisted of the ‘within’- and ‘after’-play ballads, this lecture
asks where conceptually, physically, and geographically plays
stop and ballads start; to what extent ballads are crucial paratexts
to performed plays and vice versa; and what play-ballads
can contribute to our understanding of authorship, on the one
hand, and genre on the other.
Samuel Sheppard wrote of Nashe’s ‘sweet Satyrick veine’, and John Taylor swore by the urn of ‘sweete Satyricke Nash’. Thomas Dekker memorialized ‘ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious, T. Nash: from whose aboundant pen, hony flow’d to [his] friends, and mortall Aconite to [his] enemies’, and saw Nashe as both ‘Luculent Poet’ and ‘Sharpest Satyre’. But what, to Nashe’s friends and enemies, did ‘satire’ denote, particularly in combination with honey or sweetness? And why did Nashe himself avoid the word? This chapter explores the extent to which Nashe was and was not a writer of satires, as well as where his ‘sweetness’ resides, examining, first, what early modern writers took ‘satire’ to mean, and then to examine who was thought to be writing it.
about the connection between ‘Players’ and ‘Ballad-Mungers’ –
traders of ballads – and their products. ‘Our merry Ballads, and
lascivious Playes / Are much alike’, he maintained; ‘T’one sings;
the other sayes; / And both are Fripp’ries of anothers Froth’.
According to Quarles, then, not only are plays and ballads
closely connected: each is the flourish on the other.1 Plays and
ballads, implies Quarles, at the least require one another; and
perhaps even, sometimes, bring one another about.
This lecture is about interrelationships between ballads and
plays; frippery and froth. It is in three parts. The first considers
ballads used, and sometimes authored, by two representative
playwrights, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare.
The second part is on the ballad-jigs and ballad-‘themes’ performed
when plays were over, promoted and maybe authored
by clowns. The third concerns the place where theatre ballads
were sold and by whom: outside playhouses and by ‘outsiders’
from society. And, as the ballads ‘outside’ plays seem to have
consisted of the ‘within’- and ‘after’-play ballads, this lecture
asks where conceptually, physically, and geographically plays
stop and ballads start; to what extent ballads are crucial paratexts
to performed plays and vice versa; and what play-ballads
can contribute to our understanding of authorship, on the one
hand, and genre on the other.
Samuel Sheppard wrote of Nashe’s ‘sweet Satyrick veine’, and John Taylor swore by the urn of ‘sweete Satyricke Nash’. Thomas Dekker memorialized ‘ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious, T. Nash: from whose aboundant pen, hony flow’d to [his] friends, and mortall Aconite to [his] enemies’, and saw Nashe as both ‘Luculent Poet’ and ‘Sharpest Satyre’. But what, to Nashe’s friends and enemies, did ‘satire’ denote, particularly in combination with honey or sweetness? And why did Nashe himself avoid the word? This chapter explores the extent to which Nashe was and was not a writer of satires, as well as where his ‘sweetness’ resides, examining, first, what early modern writers took ‘satire’ to mean, and then to examine who was thought to be writing it.
contribution to Shakespeare scholarship, An Attempt to
Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare
Were Written. He revised and republished it in 1790 and began
a further revision of it which was printed posthumously in
1821. This Element is about the three versions of Malone’s
Attempt and the way they created, shaped, focused, directed
and misdirected our idea of the chronology and sequence of
Shakespeare’s plays. By showing Malone’s impressive, fallible
choices, adopted or adapted by later editors, it reveals how
current Shakespeare editions are, in good and bad ways,
Malonian at heart.
Beggars to Thomas Stanley, claims that his play had what he calls ‘the luck’ to ‘tumble last of all in the epidemical ruin of the scene’: it was the last play staged before the theatres closed in 1642 as the English Civil War began. But this dedication, written not when A Jovial Crew was performed at the Cockpit/Phoenix in 1641 or 1642, but when it was printed in 1652, gives the text a ‘certain poignancy which it would not originally have possessed’ (Butler, Theatre, 269). Put on at the conventional terminus of early modern drama, and published in the middle of a national crisis, A Jovial Crew is a work that has much to say about the history of theatre and the history of England.
Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.
Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer is set in Shrewsbury in 1704 and describes what happens in a country town when the army come to stay. With cross-dressing and confusion in plenty, this is a comedy exploring the timeless themes of love and war. One of Farquhar's last two plays, The Recruiting Officer is both entertaining and touching. It has a light, humane touch and its original depiction of a real-life provincial town comically explores the impact that ongoing warfare had on its civilian society.
issues of stage and printing history, whilst also raising
questions about what a ‘Shakespeare play’ actually is. It reveals how London, the theatre, the actors and the way in which the plays were written and printed all affect the ‘Shakespeare’ that we now read. Concentrating on the instability and fluidity of Shakespeare’s texts, the book discusses what happened to a manuscript between its first composition, its performance on stage and its printing, and identifies traces of the production system in the plays that we read. It argues that the versions of Shakespeare that have come down to us have inevitably been formed by the contexts from which they emerged, being shaped by, for example, the way actors received and responded to their lines, the props and music used in the theatre, or the continual revision of plays by the playhouses and printers. Allowing a fuller understanding of the texts we read and perform, Making Shakespeare is the perfect introduction to issues of stage and page. A clear, accessible read, this book allows even those with no expert knowledge to begin to contextualise Shakespeare’s plays for themselves, in ways both old and new.
In this groundbreaking new study, Tiffany Stern gathers together two centuries' worth of historical material which shows how actors received and responded to their parts, and how rehearsal affected the creation and revision of plays. This is the first history of the subject, from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. It examines the nature and changing content of rehearsal, drawing on a mass of autobiographical, textual, and journalistic sources, and in so doing throws new light on textual revision and transforms accepted notions of Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century theatrical practice. Plotting theatrical change over time, this book will revolutionize the fields of textual and theatre history alike.