Mark Thornton - Filming and Performing Renaissance History [2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: March 29, 2011
Over the last one hundred years, many of the events and personalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been brought before home, cinema, exhibition, festival and theatrical audiences via a variety of visual media. This collection, for the first time, examines these representations, looking at recent television series, documentaries, feature films, pageantry, theatre and popular culture in a range of cultural and linguistic guises. Filming and Performing Renaissance History opens up wider avenues of interpretive opportunity and substitutes a more generous, nuanced acknowledgement of the ways in which the 'Renaissance' is made to signify across disciplines and in relation to a whole series of events and personalities. Accessing the Renaissance in this fashion generates a genuine sense of the modalities of historical representation, of what the Renaissance 'means' and of how its meanings have been negotiated in modernity.

Reviews
"This is an exciting, ground-breaking collection from a sterling cast of contributors, which launches our re-imaginings of the English and European Renaissance in film, media and popular culture into the twenty-first century."-- Robert Shaughnessy, University of Kent, UK

"In this interdisciplinary, cutting-edge volume, Burnett and Streete have selected eleven...striking essays which – in their coverage of topics as diverse as Spanish Shakespeare cinema, hit television shows like The Tudors, and Renaissance role-playing games – emphasize that the living, breathing period we call the Renaissance is anything but history."-- Greg Colón Semenza, University of Connecticut, USA

"This unique collection of essays looks at the European Renaissance as it is represented in genres like reality shows, television documentaries and series, movies, stage productions, and pageants ... Marvellously focused and rich in scope."-- Ton Hoenselaars, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

About the Authors
MARK THORNTON BURNETT is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience, as well as Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture and Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace.
ADRIAN STREETE is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England, and the co-editor of ReFiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature and The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts.