Empire on the English stage, 1660-1714 (original) (raw)
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Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660-1900
This is the Introduction to my monograph 'Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660-1900', published in August 2016 by Cambridge University Press. This is the first book on British theatre historiography, tracing scholarly practice from its origins in the Restoration to its emergence as an academic discipline in the early 20th century.
Early Drama and the English Renaissance
The artistic and cultural changes, informed by the growing interest in classical literature, that occurred in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, happened much later in England and even then not to the same extent. England’s political and cultural development had not followed the same pattern as most of the continental nations. This meant that as well as the later development of an appreciation of renaissance visual imagery, there was a cultural difference in attitudes towards humanism in general and drama in particular. This paper discusses this different cultural development and its effect on the resulting drama.
James Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution, the second volume of the new Oxford English Literary History, is an imaginative tour de force. It is both stunning in its intellectual breadth and critical honesty and astonishing in its eccentric approach to writing a literary history. Who would imagine a literary history of the period - beginning with a chapter on John Leland (ca. -)? And if the table of contents were to list only one poet in its chapter headings, would anyone have put money on that being John Lydgate rather than Geoff rey Chaucer? It is, furthermore, unusual to begin most chapters covering these two centuries with Tudor writers or vignettes rather than with earlier Middle English texts or at least Ricardian authors. It is surprising that the editors of the Oxford series allowed such a counterintuitive approach, but the result is very impressive indeed. This is not a traditional history, but a major work of interpretive scholarship that makes a signifi cant contribution to our understanding of English literature, tracing continuity as well as change by analyzing large cultural and political patterns as a whole during a time traditionally partitioned into two as comprising the end of one period of literary history and the beginning of another.