Staging Early Modern Romance

Description

This collection recovers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: early modern prose fiction, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare’s late plays. Although Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest have long been characterized as "romances," their connections with the popular prose romances of their day and the dramatic romances that preceded them have frequently been overlooked. Constructed to explore those connections, this volume includes original essays that relate at least one prose or dramatic romance to an English play written from 1570 to 1630. The introduction explores the use of the term "dramatic romance" over several centuries and the commercial association between print culture, gender, and drama. Eight essays discuss Shakespeare’s plays; three more examine plays by Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger. Other authors treated at some length include Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Chaucer, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, and Wroth. Barbara Mowat’s afterword considers Shakespeare’s use of Greek romance. Written by foremost scholars of Shakespeare and early modern prose fiction, this book explores the vital cross-currents that occurred between narrative and dramatic forms of Greek, medieval, and early modern romance.

Contents

I. Modes and Strategies

Valerie Wayne (University of Hawaii) and Mary Ellen Lamb (Southern Illinois University) "Introduction: Into the Forest"

Lori Humphrey Newcomb (University of Illinois) "The Sources of Romance, the Patterns of Pericles, and the Generation of Story"

Cyrus Mulready (University of Pennsylvania) "‘Asia of one side, and Afric of the other’: Sidney’s Unities and the Staging of Romance"

II. Page and Stage

Steven Mentz (St. John's University) "’A Note Beyond Your Reach’: Prose Fiction’s Rivalry withElizabethan Drama"

Goran Stanivukovic (University of Sheffield) Hamlet and Eourdanus

Sarah Wall-Randell (Wellesley) "Reading the Book of the Self in Cymbeline and Urania"

Mary Ellen Lamb (Southern Illlinois University) "The Tempest and Recovering the Romance of Mouldy Tales"

III. Gender and Agency

Gloria Olchowy (Green River Community College)"The Issue of the Corpus Christi Cycles in The Winter’s Tale"

Valerie Wayne (University of Hawaii) "Romancing the Wager: Cymbeline’s Intertexts"

Joyce Boro (University of Montreal) "Women Reading Romance: John Fletcher’s Women Pleased and the Pedagogy of Romance "

Clare R. Kinney (University of Virginia) "Undoing Romance: Beaumont and Fletcher’s Resistant Reading of the New Arcadia"

Lorna Hutson (University of St. Andrews) "Probable Infidelities: Rhetorical Transformations of the Ordeal of Chastity in Renaissance Narrative and Theatre"

Afterword Patricia Parker (Stanford University)

Author Bio

Valerie Wayne is Professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is Associate General Editor of The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (Oxford, 2007), editor of The Flower of Friendship by Edmund Tilney, and The Matter of Differerence.

Mary Ellen Lamb is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University and her most recent book is The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (Routledge, 2006).

Related Subjects

1. Literary/Critical Theory
2. Early Modern/Renaissance Literature
3. Shakespeare