The English Renaissance stage : geometry, poetics, and the practical spatial arts 1580-1630 / Henry S. Turner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Turner, Henry S.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Theater--England--16th century--History and criticism.

Theater.

Theater--England--17th century--History and criticism.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600--History and criticism.

English drama.

English drama--17th century--History and criticism.

England.

Physical Description:

xv, 326 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006.

Summary:

Drawing on entirely new evidence, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630 examines the history of English dramatic form and its relationship to mathematics, technology, and early scientific thought during the Renaissance period. The book demonstrates how practical modes of thinking that were typical of the sixteenth century resulted in new genres of plays and a new vocabulary for problems of poetic representation. In the epistemological moment the book recovers, we find new ideas about form and language that would become central to Renaissance literary discourse; in this same moment, too, we find new ways of thinking about the relationship between theory and practice that are typical of modernity, new attitudes towards spatial representation, and a new interest in both poetics and mathematics as distinctive ways of producing knowledge about the world. By emphasizing the importance of theatrical performance, the book engages with continuing debates over the cultural function of the early modern stage and with scholarship on the status of modern authorship. When we consider playwrights in relation to the theatre rather than the printed book, they appear less as 'authors' than as figures whose social position and epistemological presuppositions were very similar to the craftsmen, surveyors, and engineers who began to flourish during the sixteenth century and whose mathematical knowledge made them increasingly sought after by men of wealth and power.

Contents:

I Diagram, Image, Icon

2 Practical Knowledge and the Poetics of Geometry 43

3 Sir Philip Sidney and the Practical Imagination 82

4 Noun, Foot, and Measured Line 114

II Stage, Wall, Scene, Plot

5 Theatre as a Spatial Art 155

6 The Topographic Stage 186

7 Dramatic Form and the Projective Intelligence 216

8 Ben Jonson's Scenography 244.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [279]-312) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

0199287384

OCLC:

62342742

Publisher Number:

9780199287383

Online:

Publisher description