Seneca by Candlelight and Other Stories of Renaissance Drama / / Lorraine Helms.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn eBook Package Archive 1898-1999 (pre Pub)
• VerfasserIn: Helms, Lorraine,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2017]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Edition: Reprint 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (202 p.)

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book "English Seneca read by candlelight," wrote the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe, "will afford you whole Hamlets." In the early decades of the twentieth century, literary and theater historians took Nashe at his word, finding Senecan tragedy at the source of Renaissance drama. More recently, critics have been inclined to dismiss traces of classical antiquity as a superficial veneer on a drama derived from medieval traditions. Lorraine Helms revisits this terrain to explore the rich and various ways in which classical learning shaped the theatrical culture of the Renaissance. She uncovers the practical advice on acting and stagecraft to be found in the writings of ancient rhetoricians; reconstructs the extraordinary circumstances under which an English woman first rendered Euripides into her native language; and ponders the precedents in antiquity for Elizabethan portrayals of prostitution and female martyrdom.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Prologue -- Seneca by Candlelight -- Iphigenia in Durham -- The Saint in the Brothel -- Voluntary Wounds -- Ethnicke Lamentations -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Acknowledgments -- Index