A01=Douglas Bruster
A01=Robert Weimann
Author_Douglas Bruster
Author_Robert Weimann
authority
bi-fold
Bi-fold Authority
Category=DDA
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
Commercial Playhouses
Crooked Figure
cultural rituals stage
Doctor Faustus
drama
dramatic
dramatic audience engagement
Dramatic Prologue
early
Early Modern Playhouse
Early Modern Playwrights
Elizabethan theatre studies
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Feeble Muse
High Astounding Terms
humilis
Imaginary Puissance
Iron Pen
liminality in performance
Marlowe Peele Lyly analysis
modern
playhouse
playwrights
prologue function early modern drama
Quince's Prologue
Quince’s Prologue
Ralph Roister Doister
Rare Wits
Rhyming Mother Wits
Richard III
Scaffold Stage
sermo
Sermo Humilis
Swelling Scene
threshold theory drama
Tragic Glass
Uncounted Heads
Unworthy Scaffold
Vasty Fields
Wives Tale
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780415334426
- Weight: 362g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 18 Nov 2004
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This eye-opening study draws attention to the largely neglected form of the early modern prologue. Reading the prologue in performed as well as printed contexts, Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann take us beyond concepts of stability and autonomy in dramatic beginnings to reveal the crucial cultural functions performed by the prologue in Elizabethan England.
While its most basic task is to seize the attention of a noisy audience, the prologue's more significant threshold position is used to usher spectators and actors through a rite of passage. Engaging competing claims, expectations and offerings, the prologue introduces, authorizes and, critically, straddles the worlds of the actual theatrical event and the 'counterfeit' world on stage. In this way, prologues occupy a unique and powerful position between two orders of cultural practice and perception.
Close readings of prologues by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Marlowe, Peele and Lyly, demonstrate the prologue's role in representing both the world in the play and playing in the world. Through their detailed examination of this remarkable form and its functions, the authors provide a fascinating perspective on early modern drama, a perspective that enriches our knowledge of the plays' socio-cultural context and their mode of theatrical address and action.
Douglas Bruster, Robert Weimann
