THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE STAGE by Henry S. Turner ( 9780199287383 )

Item Details

Title:

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE STAGE
GEOMETRY, POETICS, AND THE PRACTICAL SPATIAL ARTS 1580-1630

By:

Henry S. Turner

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£127.50

Our price:

£111.56

Discount:

12.5% off

You save:

£15.94

ISBN 10:

0199287384

ISBN 13:

9780199287383

Availability:

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Publisher:

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

23 February, 2006

Pages:

328

Description:

Drawing on entirely new evidence, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630 demonstrates how the drama of Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, and others cannot be adequately explained without reference to early scientific thought. The book recovers almost historical moment when playwrights collaborated with carpenters, surveyors, and engineers, and poets borrowed their ideas about literary form from the field ofpractical mathematics.

Synopsis:

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 the 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.

Illustrations:

27 halftones

Publication:

Imprint:

Oxford University Press

Prizes:

Winner of Honorable Mention 2007 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

ANAMORPHOSIS IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE (HB)

BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP, SCIENCE AND POLITICS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND (HB)