Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern EnglandThe Domestic Play Flourished on the English popular stage during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its roots were predominantly native, rather than classical, and its mainspring was the staging of domestic conflict amongst English characters from the middle ranks of society. Household Business traces the genre's origins in the cycle plays of medieval England and examines its aesthetic configurations in relation to extra-literary discourses and practices that underwrote Renaissance ideologies of private life. At a time when the orthodox view of the family defined it as the foundation of the social order, a number of domestic dramas took a more critical perspective, stressing the contradictions and struggles that attend marriage and the patriarchial family. In addition to well-known domestic dramas as A Woman Killed with Kindness, Arden of Fevershaw, The Witch of Edmonton, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, Comensoli analyzes less well-studied plays as A Warning for Fair Women, Two Lamentable Tragedies, and The Late Lancashire Witches. The book also provides an extensive and timely assessment of domestic comedy, demonstrating how plays such as The London Prodigal, The Fair Maid of Bristow, and The Honest Whore (Parts I and II) resist homiletic paradigms in favour of a more dialectical dramaturgy. |
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Contents
Medieval and Tudor Contexts | 27 |
Domestic Tragedy and Private Life | 65 |
Developments in Comedy | 132 |
Copyright | |
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Other editions - View all
Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England Viviana Comensoli No preview available - 1999 |
Common terms and phrases
action adultery Alice Anne's Arden of Feversham argues audience behaviour Bellafront Bridewell Candido characters civility Clerk's Tale contemporary crimes cultural discourses domestic drama domestic play domestic tragedy Early Modern England edition Elizabethan emphasis England English Domestic Fair Women female Frank Frankford's Further references gender genre Griselda Gwalter's Harrison haue hierarchy homiletic Homiletic Tragedy homilies Honest Whore hospitality household husband ideal ideology Jacobean Killed with Kindness Late Lancashire Witches literature London London Prodigal Macbeth Malleus Maleficarum marquess marriage married medieval Merry's moral Mother Sawyer murder pageants Patient Grissil patient wife patriarchal play's playwrights plot political portrayal private space Prodigal punishment repentance role scene Sermons Shakespeare sixteenth century social society spectator stage structures suggests Susan texts theatre Thomas Dekker Thomas Heywood tion Towneley traditional transgression Tudor Warning for Fair Wendoll Whore plays wife's Witch of Edmonton witchcraft wives Woman Killed writes Yorkshire Tragedy
Bibliographic information
| Title | Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England The mental and cultural world of Tudor and Stuart England |
| Author | Viviana Comensoli |
| Edition | reprint |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press, 1996 |
| Original from | the University of California |
| Digitized | May 27, 2008 |
| ISBN | 0802007333, 9780802007339 |
| Length | 238 pages |
| Subjects | › Literary Criticism / Drama |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |