Masques

Those privileged enough to attend performances of masques at court in the early seventeenth century invariably commented on the sumptuousness of the music. Yet our view of the masque has been dominated by the texts, and indeed, modern scholarship has tended to treat the masque first and foremost as a literary genre. This book is the first complete study of the multi-faceted view of its subject, piecing together a picture of what the music was actually like from musical scores, documentary evidence, and the dramatic texts.

Spanning from the inauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature. Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldry, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.

Explores the phenomenon of joint authorship among playwrights in seventeenth-century England Over half of the plays of the English Renaissance were written collaboratively --by multiple dramatists working together. Joint Enterprises examines this kind of dramatic production, charting its social and professional significance as a historically embedded but personally inflected creative phenomenon. By situating individual joint works such as Eastward Hoe, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Changeling in specific institutional contexts, Heather Hirschfeld explores the diverse motivations driving dramatic collaborations, traces the distinct writerly relationships that developed from such energies, and analyzes their rhetorical effects in individual plays. Drawing on a range of documentary and literary sources as well as recent methodological advances in theater history, the book presents a sequence of case studies designed to accommodate both the larger cultural setting of the early modern theater and thelocalized,,idiosyncratic factors influencing discrete literary productions. Each chapter chronicles the professional setting of a particular joint work and then investigates its rhetorical or linguistic traces in the resultant text. This approach allows Hirschfeld to locate specific links between modes of collaborative production and forms of dramatic representation and then explicate the literary and political implications of these connections. Hirschfeld's case studies provide a fresh account of the institutionalization--the steady growth, organization, and incorporation--of the professional drama in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English cultural life. By attending to the changing shapesand stakes of joint enterprises, she shows that dramatists did not unconsciously absorb the practice of collaborative writing from general social discourses, but rather were aware of the material and symbolic significances of

"This index is a veritable who's who of the greats of Western literature. . . . The Board recommends it for every collection whose users conduct analytical studies of literature." Reference Books Bulletin