1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910798420603321

Autore

Levine Nina S. <1950->

Titolo

Practicing the city : early modern London on stage / / Nina Levine

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Fordham University Press, , 2016

2016

ISBN

0-8232-6789-X

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (209 p.)

Disciplina

822/.309358421

Soggetti

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

English drama - 17th century - History and criticism

City and town life in literature

Theater and society - England - London - History

Theater - England - London - History - 16th century

Theater - England - London - History - 17th century

London (England) In literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Presupposing the Stage -- 1. Extending Credit and the Henry IV Plays -- 2. Differentiating Collaboration: Protest and Playwriting and Sir Thomas More -- 3. Trading in Tongues: Language Lessons and Englishmen for My Money -- 4. The Place of the Present: Making Time and The Roaring Girl -- Epilogue: The Place of the Spectator -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In late-sixteenth-century London, the commercial theaters undertook a novel experiment, fueling a fashion for plays that trafficked in the contemporary urban scene. But beyond the stage’s representing the everyday activities of the expanding metropolis, its unprecedented urban turn introduced a new dimension into theatrical experience, opening up a reflexive space within which an increasingly diverse population might begin to “practice” the city. In this, the London stage began to operate as a medium as well as a model for urban understanding. Practicing the City traces a range of local engagements,



onstage and off, in which the city’s population came to practice new forms of urban sociability and belonging. With this practice, Levine suggests, city residents became more self-conscious about their place within the expanding metropolis and, in the process, began to experiment in new forms of collective association. Reading an array of materials, from Shakespeare and Middleton to plague bills and French-language manuals, Levine explores urban practices that push against the exclusions of civic tradition and look instead to the more fluid relations playing out in the disruptive encounters of urban plurality.