Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre

By Oxford UniversityEducation

Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre episodes

November 16, 2015 The Tamer Tam'd: John Fletcher
A riposte to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew Fletcher’s play is a riposte to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: in this lecture I discuss their interconnectedness as a way to identify Fletcher’s particular dramaturgy.
53 min
November 11, 2015 Tis Pity She's a Whore: John Ford
Reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays This lecture discusses the play’s reboot of Romeo and Juliet and other Elizabethan plays, its sensationalism, and its connections to anatomy.
54 min
November 03, 2015 The Witch Of Edmonton
Witchcraft and bigamy. A collaborative play about witchcraft, bigamy - and a talking Dog - what more could you want?
46 min
October 27, 2015 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside: Thomas Middleton
This lecture discusses comedy, fertility, and all those illegitimate children in this play about sex, economics and meat.
54 min
October 27, 2015 The Alchemist: Ben Jonson
Written in the context of plague in London, The Alchemist’s plot and language are deeply concerned with speed and speculation.
49 min
October 26, 2015 Dr Faustus: Christopher Marlowe
My lecture on this infernal play discusses Elizabethan religion, the revisions to the play, and whether we should think about James Bond in its final minutes.
50 min
November 24, 2009 The Duchess of Malfi: John Webster
In dramatizing a woman's sexual choices in a notably sympathetic manner, this tragedy articulates perennial questions about female autonomy and class distinction.
38 min
November 13, 2009 The Roaring Girl: Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker
Based on a contemporary scandal of a woman who dressed in male clothing, this play of topsy-turvy genders has fun with some very modern ideas about sexuality, identity and whether we are what we wear.
49 min
November 06, 2009 The Revenger's Tragedy: Thomas Middleton
A blackly camp tragedy - Hamlet without the narcissism - set in a court corrupted by lust and self-interest, this play is both fascinated and repelled by its own depravity.
46 min
November 06, 2009 The Shoemaker's Holiday: Thomas Dekker
Like a Busby Berkeley depression-era musical, Dekker's comedy is a feel-good antidote to a context of shortages, political malaise and general pessimism, but real life in the shape of war, class antagonism and civic tensions, always threatens to intrude.
46 min

About Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre

From the publisher's feed

This series of six lectures introduces six plays from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Once popular and now little-known, they can tell us a lot about what their first audiences enjoyed, aspired to and worried about - from immigrants in early modern London to the role of women in the household, from what religious changes might mean for attitudes to the dead to fantasies of easy money and social elevation.