Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre provides a comprehensive examination of this aesthetic theory. The author investigates this aesthetic history as a form of artistic creation, philosophical investigation, a way of representing and manipulating ideas about gender and a way of acknowledging, reinforcing and making a critique of social values for the still and moving, the permanent and elapsing.
The book's analysis covers the entire seventeenth-century with chapters on the work of Ben Jonson, John Milton, the pamphletheatre, Aphra Behn, John Vanbrugh and Jeremy Collier and will be of interest to scholars in the areas of literary and performance studies.
Introduction
Prologue: Making Sense
1. Permanently Moving: Ben Jonson and the Design of a Lasting Performance
2. Predominantly Still: John Milton and the Sacred Persuasion in Performance
3. Theatrically Pressed: Pamphletheatre and the Performance of a Nation
4. Decidedly Moving: Aphra Behn and the Staging of Paradoxical Pleasures
5. Perpetually Stilled: Jeremy Collier and John Vanbrugh on Bonds, Women and Soliloquies
Epilogue: Making Space
Biography
P.A. Skantze is an independent scholar and director working in Rome. Currently a Fellow at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in 2003, she was a Fulbright senior research fellow in 2002 working on a project on the European Union, transnational identity and theatre festivals.
