1,720,970 research outputs found
London Theatrical Culture, 1560-1590
No full textEarly modern drama was a product of the new theatrical spaces that began to open from the 1560s onward, multiple venues in and just outside London that played to a significant proportion of Londoners on most afternoons. Revisiting the evidence for this historical moment offers the opportunity to look afresh at the playhouses, plays, and playmakers that drove this new theatrical culture. These three terms include the inns and indoor spaces that regularly hosted plays, alongside the now more familiar outdoor, amphitheatrical venues the Theatre and the Rose; plays onstage, plays in print, and plays that are now lost; and the writers, actors, company managers, and male and female playhouse builders and investors who made the creation and performance of those plays possible. Conventional histories of this period’s theaters have tended to concentrate on the opening of the Theatre in 1576 as the first such playhouse. Scholarship of the late 20th and early 21st centuries shows that this event was not the initiating formative act it has come to seem, and emphasizes instead the multiple decades and kinds of playing space that need to be attended to in understanding the earliest years of the playhouses. Multiple kinds of playing company, too, operated in this period, in particular companies made up of predominantly adult male performers, with boys playing female roles, and companies composed entirely of boy performers
Act break 4: the bear stage
No full textThe animal remains at baiting arenas represent a unique set of archaeological fauna, exceptional in that their location connects them clearly to a wealth of documentary and literary evidence about their lifetime activities. Box Office Bears is a new research project that puts into dialogue this archaeological and documentary evidence with ancient-DNA analysis, asking new questions about baiting as a form of play: a game, a performance, a sport, an opportunity to bet, kinetic combat around which to excitedly crowd. This 'act break' will explore this predominantly non-verbal performance and non-human spectacle across the full range of expertise of our project, and ask what it means to think about Shakespearean play via bears. <br/
What does a bear baiting assemblage look like?: Interdisciplinary analysis of an early modern “sport”
No full textBear baiting was a popular and culturally important form of entertainment in Shakespeare’s England. It occurred all over the country, but was most formalised in Bankside, London, a key early modern entertainment hub. Here, we bring together zooarchaeological, stable isotope and archival evidence from nine archaeological sites in Bankside to define features specific to bear baiting. We then provide a model for identifying bear baiting assemblages in the archaeological record of England and beyond
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