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This is volume 41 issue 12 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This collection brings together critical race studies and affect theory to examine the emotional dimensions of race in early modern literature. 

Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature puts the fields of critical race studies and affect theory into dialogue. Doing so opens a new set of questions: What are the emotional experiences of racial formation and racist ideologies? How do feelings—through the physical senses, emotional passions, or sexual encounters—come to signify race? What is the affective register of anti-blackness that pervades canonical literature? How can these visceral forms of racism be resisted in discourse and in practice? By investigating how race feels, this book offers new ways of reading and interpreting literary traditions, religious differences, gendered experiences, class hierarchies, sexuality, and social identities. So far scholars have shaped the discussion of race in the early modern period by focusing on topics such as genealogy, language, economics, religion, skin color, and ethnicity. This book, however, offers something new: it considers racializing processes as visceral, affective experiences.

Mary J. Blige is an icon who represents the political consciousness of hip hop and the historical promise of soul. She is an everywoman, celebrated by Oprah Winfrey and beloved by pop music fans of all ages and races. Blige has sold over fifty million albums, won numerous Grammys, and even played at multiple White House events, as well as the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Displaying astonishing range and versatility, she has recorded everything from Broadway standards to Led Zeppelin anthems and worked with some of popular music’s greatest artists—Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Sting, U2, and Beyoncé, among them.

Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige tells the story of one of the most important artists in pop music history. Danny Alexander follows the whole arc of Blige’s career, from her first album, which heralded the birth of “hip hop soul,” to her critically praised 2014 album, The London Sessions. He highlights the fact that Blige was part of the historically unprecedented movement of black women onto pop radio and explores how she and other women took control of their careers and used their music to give voice to women’s (and men’s) everyday struggles and dreams. This book adds immensely to the story of both black women artists and artists rooted in hip hop and pays tribute to a musician who, by expanding her reach and asking tough questions about how music can and should evolve, has proven herself an artistic visionary.

This book reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon.

Any review of 20th-century American theatre invariably leads to the term realism. Yet despite the strong tradition of theatrical realism on the American stage, the term is frequently misidentified, and the practices to which it refers are often attacked as monolithically tyrannical, restricting the potential of the American national theatre.This book reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon. By reconsidering the form and revisiting many of the plays that contributed to the realist tradition, the authors provide the opportunity to apprise strengths often overlooked by previous critics. The volume traces the development of American dramatic realism from James A. Herne, the "American Ibsen," to currently active contemporaries such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Marsha Norman. This frank assessment, in sixteen original essays, reopens a critical dialog too long closed.

Essays include:

American Dramatic Realisms, Viable Frames of Thought

The Struggle for the Real--Interpretive Conflict, Dramatic Method, and the Paradox of Realism

The Legacy of James A. Herne: American Realities and Realisms

Whose Realism? Rachel Crothers's Power Struggle in the American Theatre

The Provincetown Players' Experiments with Realism

Servant of Three Masters: Realism, Idealism, and "Hokum" in American High Comedy

 

This is volume 49 issue 2 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 50 issue 1 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 50 issue 2 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 51 issue 1 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 51 issue 2 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 52 issue 1 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 52 issue 2 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 53 issue 1 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 53 issue 2 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

This is volume 54 issue 1 of Renaissance Drama. Renaissance Drama explores the rich variety of theatrical and performance traditions and practices in early modern Europe and intersecting cultures. The sole scholarly journal devoted to the full expanse of Renaissance theatre and performance, the journal publishes articles that extend the scope of our understanding of early modern playing, theatre history, and dramatic texts and interpretation, encouraging innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to these traditions, examining familiar works, and revisiting well-known texts from fresh perspectives.

In his original new study, Seth Graham analyzes a rich and forgotten vein of humor in an otherwise bleak environment. The late Soviet period (1961–1986) hardly seems fertile ground for humor, but Russian jokes (anekdoty) about life in the Soviet Union were ubiquitous. The cultural and political relaxation in the decade following Stalin’s death produced considerable optimism among Soviet citizens. The anekdot exploited and exposed what Graham calls "Soviet diglossia" (official Sovietese vs. Russian everyday language) and emphasized the distance between official myths and quotidian reality. Jokes engaged a range of official and popular culture genres and also worked meta-textually, referring to the political consequences of jokes. While the dissidents of this period, who stressed the heroic and opposed everything Soviet, have been much written about, Graham’s work on the anekdoty—written in the third person, ironic, and engaged with everything Soviet—fills a hole that has been overlooked in cultural history.

This anthology of four plays written or performed between 1662 and 1677 offers a unique snapshot of the diverse nature of Restoration drama by women. 

Restoration Women’s Drama collects four Restoration plays by women: the highly acclaimed Katherine Philips, the successful professional Aphra Behn, the confidently original Margaret Cavendish, and the obscure pioneer Frances Boothby. This anthology includes Behn’s only tragedy as well as the first printed edition of Boothby’s Marcelia, the first play by a woman to be professionally staged in London, demonstrating the range of early modern drama produced by women in this period. An excellent introduction, it is poised to stimulate new discussions of women’s authorship, theatrical knowledge, and literary affinities. Each play has been edited afresh, and each has been modernized and annotated to facilitate reading, teaching, and performance possibilities.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the Ottawa chief Pontiac (also spelled Ponteach) led an intertribal confederacy that resisted British power in the Great Lakes region. This event was immortalized in the play Ponteach, or the Savages of America: A Tragedy, attributed to the infamous frontier soldier Robert Rogers. Never performed, it is one of the earliest theatrical renderings of the region, depicting its hero in a way that called into question eighteenth-century constructions of Indigenous Americans.
Sämi Ludwig contends that Ponteach's literary and artistic merits are worthy of further exploration. He investigates questions of authorship and analyzes the play's content, embracing its many contradictions as enriching windows into the era. In this way, he suggests using Ponteach as a tool to better understand British imperialism in North America and the emerging theatrical forms of the Young Republic.

Shakespeare’s history play reimagined by Naomi Iizuka.

Following the events of the final two years of his life, Richard II interrogates royal power and the forces that threaten it. After banishing his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Richard begins to lose grip of his throne and strives to find meaning in the churn and chaos of the events unfolding around him. In her new translation, Naomi Iizuka ventures into the mystery of the work, scraping away the layers of received wisdom and cracking the play open for contemporary audiences.

This translation of Richard II was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

Playwright Migdalia Cruz breathes new life into Richard III.
 
Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz unpacks and repositions Shakespeare’s Richard III for a twenty-first-century audience. She presents a contemporary English verse translation, faithfully keeping the poetry, the puns, and the politics of the play intact, with a rigorous and in-depth examination of Richard III—the man, the king, the outsider—who is still the only English king to have died in battle. In the Wars of the Roses, his Catholic belief in his country led to his slaughter at Bosworth’s Field by his Protestant rivals. In reimagining this text, Cruz emphasizes Richard III’s outsider status—exacerbated by his severe scoliosis, which twisted his spine—by punctuating the text with punk music from 1970s London. Cruz’s Richard is no one’s fool or lackey. He is a new kind of monarch, whose dark sense of humor and deep sense of purpose leads his charge against the society which never fully accepted him because he looked different.

This translation was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era. 

Shakespeare’s famous play finds new life with a translation into contemporary American English.

“For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” In this new version of Romeo and Juliet, written in accessible modern English, Hansol Jung breathes new life into Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. By closely examining the familiar language and focusing on the subtleties of the text, Jung illuminates a surprising and more nuanced world than many of us have come to expect from the well-known tale of star-crossed lovers.

This translation of Romeo and Juliet was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

“Art has a lot to answer for.” So says Sarah Bernhardt in Ronald Harwood’s play After the Lions. Harwood’s own career can be summarized by that same quote as well.
         Ronald Harwood’s Tragic Vision offers the first critical analysis of prolific and award-winning British author Ronald Harwood (1934–2020). Though he received an Oscar for The Pianist, a knighthood, and numerous other awards and nominations, Harwood worked as a ghostwriter, script doctor, and veritable unknown for many years. As he became successful, many critics still misread his works and positioned him as a less-fashionable counterpart to his lifelong friend Harold Pinter. This study proposes a conceptual framework to approach his, and others’, work based on the genre of tragedy, offering a greater appreciation for and understanding of the Harwood canon.
 

In Sam Shepard's play Action a character asks, "What's a community?" only to find that no one really knows. Rooms with a View attempts to chart the development of communal concepts through the discourse of dramatic modernism, defining a coherent pattern that illustrates and anticipates innovations in modern and postmodern social theory. To clarify the commonplace notion that audiences actively participate in dramatic art, the intro-ductory chapter theorizes a performance community, which audience, actors, and other backstage actants (such as playwrights and directors) provisionally form in the theater. Connecting psychological, sociological, and aesthetic insights ranging from Freud to Kohut, from Simmel to Nancy, and from Artaud and Brecht to Arnheim and Jellicoe, Richard Barr shows how modernist thinkers are repeatedly drawn to the ideal of communion. The distinctive structure of this collective inquiry helps untangle the roots and routes of modern drama and social thought. Barr analyzes the social and aesthetic theory of four in-fluential dramatists. Ibsen and Strindberg, he claims, explore ways of acknowledging the integrity of individual viewpoints while maintaining collective coherence. Pirandello and, in more radical ways, Beckett, conclude that conflict and division are not simply inevitable but invaluable in organizing alternative perspectives. By analyzing the ways playwrights variously conceive and achieve the complicated unity called community, Rooms with a View produces the rich paradox that difference may make the most difference in creative communal consensus. Richard L. Barr holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and has taught English at Rutgers University. He is currently a specialist in intersubjective relations, practicing in New Jersey and Switzerland.

Although younger than most European theatrical traditions, the Russian professional theater has generated an exciting body of criticism and theory which until recently has remained unknown or nearly inaccessible in the West. This anthology presents a selection of important Russian writing on the aesthetics of drama and the theater from 1828 to 1914.

The focus of these essays, most published here for the first time in English, is on the so-called Crisis in the Theater of 1904 to 1914, a lively debate between the symbolists and the naturalists that evoked brilliant polemic writing from Meyerhold, Bely, Bryusov, and others. Along with Chekhov's amusing critique of Sarah Bernhardt ("monstrously facile!") and Ivanov's abstruse analysis of the essence of tragedy, the essays form a running commentary on the development of the Russian theater: Pushkin on his predecessors, Gogol on his own work, Belinsky on Gogol, Sleptsov on Ostrovsky and Leskov, Bely on Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard ("enervated people, trying to forget the terror of life"), the symbolists on one another.

Each selection is printed in its entirety, with extensive notes, and a lengthy introduction places all the pieces within their historical and cultural contexts to comprise a brief history of Russian dramatic theory before the revolution. This volume is essential reading for all who wish to extend their knowledge of the Russian contribution to theatrical history, theory, and criticism.