| Description |
1 online resource (xvi, 220 pages) : illustrations |
| Physical Medium |
monochrome |
| Description |
text file |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Introduction -- The offstage in theory and practice -- Scene individable, or poem unlimited : premodern theories of the dramatic mode -- The narrative economy of social commerce -- The offstage in amphitheaters and texts -- Cleaving the general ear -- Didascalic space in early modern printed drama. |
| Summary |
Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers' sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama's nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage. Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama. Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies Publisher description |
| Biography |
Jonathan Walker is a professor of English at Portland State University |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
Offstage action (Drama) -- History and criticism.
|
|
Offstage action (Drama) |
|
English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism.
|
|
LITERARY CRITICISM -- Renaissance. |
|
English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan. |
| Chronological Term |
1500-1600 |
| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
|
| Other Form: |
Print version: Walker, Jonathan. Site unscene. Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2017 9780810135024 0810135027 (DLC) 2017000593 (OCoLC)958781166 |
| ISBN |
9780810135031 (electronic book) |
|
0810135035 (electronic book) |
|
9780810135024 (cloth ; alkaline paper) |
|
9780810135017 (paperback ; alkaline paper) |
|
0810135027 |
|
0810135019 (paperback ; alkaline paper) |
|
