M. A. Katritzky

Pavel Drábek

This volume explores the transnationality and interculturality of early modern performance in multiple languages, cultures, countries and genres. Its twelve essays compose a complex image of theatre connections as a socially, economically, politically and culturally rich tissue of networks and influences. With particular attention to itinerant performers, court festival, and the Black, Muslim and Jewish impact, they combine disciplines and methods to place Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the wider context of performance culture in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Czech and Italian speaking Europe. The authors examine transnational connections by offering multidisciplinary perspectives on the theatrical significance of concrete historical facts: archaeological findings, archival records, visual artefacts, and textual evidence.

Transnational connections in early modern theatre

Lyckle de Vries

Thomas F. Heck

Tom Heck

R. L. Erenstein

A. William Smith

Frank Peeters

Heck traces the idea of icono-graphia from its distant Greek roots down to today's trendy world of icons and iconographies; he also provides a concise introduction to musical iconography. Robert Erenstein discusses the rise of theatre iconography with some choice Dutch examples. Frank Peeters and A.

The Iconography of the Performing Arts in Concept and Practice

Picturing Performance

Drawing on a comprehensive range of early modern British, German and other European images and texts, this study offers the first interdisciplinary gendered assessment of early modern performing itinerant quacks. The contribution of women is taken as the focus for an investigation of the nature of the links between the theatrical and the medical, in the activities of quack troupes as they went about curing, selling and, above all, performing.

Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks

Women, Medicine and Theatre, 1500-1750

Italian comedians attracted audiences to performances at every level, from the magnificent Italian, German and French court festival appearances of Orlando di Lasso or Isabella Andreini, to the humble street trestle lazzi of anonymous quacks. The characters they inspired continue to exercise a profound cultural influence, and an understanding of the commedia dell arte and its visual record is fundamental for scholars of post-1550 European drama, literature, art and music. The 340 plates presented here are considered in the light of the rise and spread of commedia stock types, and especially Harlequin, Zanni and the actresses. Intensively researched in public and private collections in Oxford, Munich, Florence, Venice, Paris and elsewhere, they complement the familiar images of Jacques Callot and the Stockholm Recueil Fossard within a framework of hundreds of significant pictures still virtually unknown in this context. These range from anonymous popular prints to pictures by artists such as Ambrogio Brambilla, Sebastian Vrancx, Jan Bruegel, Louis de Caulery, Marten de Vos, and members of the Valckenborch and Francken clans. This volume, essential for commedia dell arte specialists, represents an invaluable reference resource for scholars, students, theatre practitioners and artists concerned with commedia-related aspects of visual, dramatic and festival culture, in and beyond Italy."

M. A. Katritzky

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