A01=Nicholas de Somogyi
AMidsummer Night's Dream
Author_Nicholas de Somogyi
Blind Geographers
Category=ATD
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
Category=JBCC
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
Civitates Orbis Terrarum
Common Language
early modern drama studies
Edward III
Elizabethan military culture
English Renaissance theatre
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Folio Text
Geometric Calculus
gloriosus
God Of Warre
God Ofwar
Henry III
Henry IV
Heywood's Apology
historical stagecraft
Honourable Reputation
john
london
Marlowe's Tamburlaine
miles
Miles Gloriosus
military influence on Elizabethan drama
oldcastle
opima
Opima Spolia
Patriotic Martialism
performance and warfare
playhouse
Prob Ability
Richard III
sir
Sir George Buc
Sir John Oldcastle
Sir Tophas
Sixteenth Century Warf
spanish
Spanish Tragedy
tragedy
war narratives in literature
Wartime Performance
Product details
- ISBN 9781840142075
- Weight: 589g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 10 Nov 1998
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The period between 1585 (when Elizabeth formally committed her military support to the Dutch wars against Spain) and 1604 (when James at last brought it to an end) was one in which English life was preoccupied by the menace and actuality of war. The same period spans English drama’s coming of age, from Tamburlaine to Hamlet. In this thought-provoking book, Nick de Somogyi draws on a wide range of contemporary military literature (news-letters and war-treatises, maps and manuals), to demonstrate how deeply wartime experience influenced the production and reception of Elizabethan theatre. In a series of vivid parallels, the roles of soldier and actor, the setting of battlefield and stage, and the context of playhouse and muster are shown to have been rooted in the common experience of war. The local armoury served as a props department; the stage as a military lecture-hall. News from the front line has always been shrouded in the fog of war. Shakespeare’s Rumour is here seen as kindred to such equally dubious messengers as his Armado, Falstaff or Pistol; soldiers have always told tall tales, military ghost-stories that are here shown to have seeped into such narratives as The Spanish Tragedy and Henry V. This book concludes with a sustained account of Hamlet, a play which both dramatises the Elizabethan context of war-fever, and embodies in its three variant texts the war and peace that shaped its production. By affording scrutiny to each of its title’s components, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War provides a compelling argument for reassessing the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries within the enduring context of the military culture and wartime experience of his age.
Nicholas de Somogyi is a freelance writer and researcher. He is a genealogist at the College of Arms in London and a teacher at the Education department of Shakespeare’s Globe. He also worked on the editing of the Globe Quartos series.
