Spectacular Performances

Essays on theatre, imagery, books, and selves in Early Modern England

By: Stephen Orgel

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Paperback | 31 October 2013

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304 Pages

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23.4 x 15.6 x 1.6

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Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James? How do the concepts of costume as high fashion and as self-fashioning, as disguise and as the very essence of theatre, relate to one other? How do portraits of poets help create the author that readers want, and why should books, the embodiment of the word, be illustrated at all? What conventions connect image to text, and what impulses generated the great art collections of the early seventeenth century?

In this richly illustrated collection on theatre, books, art and personal style, the eminent literary critic and cultural historian Stephen Orgel addresses himself to such questions in order to reflect generally on early modern representation and, in the largest sense, early modern performance. As wide-ranging as they are perceptive, the essays deal with Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton, with Renaissance magic and Renaissance costume, with books and book illustration, art collecting and mythography.

Industry Reviews

'He lays before us verbal and visual representations of title-pages, frontispieces, stage and costume designs by Inigo Jones, architectural splendors, portraits, maps, stage productions over the centuries, and still more, all informed by an extensive command of art history, intellectual history, humanist learning, the history of book illustration, and above all the history of every kind of theatrical representation. Stephen Orgel is himself the embodiment of the humanist scholar, and this present book is a rich repository of that great tradition...The present volume is a splendid collection of his work at its best.'
DAVID BEVINGTON, University of Chicago, Renaissance Quarterly

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