Paperback
By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, Smith offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture.
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Performance and Religion in Early Modern England

Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street

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  • Paperback

    402 pages

  • Release Date

    15 December 2018

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Summary

In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture.

Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780268104665
ISBN-10:0268104662
Author:Matthew J. Smith
Publisher:University of Notre Dame Press
Imprint:University of Notre Dame Press
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:402
Release Date:15 December 2018
Weight:590g
Dimensions:23mm x 152mm x 229mm
Series:ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern
A-Format
B-Format
Performance and Religion in Early Modern England by Matthew J. Smith - ISBN: 9780268104665
152 × 229 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“Performance and Religion in Early Modern England strongly reinforces the interconnectedness of the religion and the theatrical in the Shakespearean era.“—Anglican & Episcopal History

(Anglican & Episcopal History)

“The central argument is one that many scholars will need to absorb and contemplate, as it reorients how we think of theatricality. This is a book that should be widely read and digested.” —Religion and Literature

“Matthew Smith’s Performance and Religion in Early Modern England ranges widely and imaginatively over the landscape of late medieval and early modern performance, urgently blurring the boundaries between festival and secular theater, and between theater and sermons, ballads, and jigs. What emerges is a crucial imagining of the critical interplay of presence and representation, and of the critical porousness of early modern performance as well.” —W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University

“This is the only book I know that pays such careful attention to the specific performance conditions of so many modes and the intertheatrical relationships among them. Matthew Smith has gathered a diverse set of performance materials into a project of real magnitude, coherence, and consequence. Every chapter of Smith’s book delivers new insights, judicious reframings, and dazzlingly original connections that bring together familiar and unfamiliar texts. This is the kind of book that could well win acclaim for its originality, learning, ambition, and argumentative contribution.“—Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine

“In its exploration of the religious basis of early modern theatrical experience, Matthew Smith’s study recalibrates our understanding of the period’s theater and plays. This is Mankind and Marlowe both, and an argument worth our careful attention.” —Douglas Bruster, University of Texas at Austin

About The Author

Matthew J. Smith

Matthew J. Smith is associate professor of English at Azusa Pacific University.

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