Description
Book SynopsisFestive Enterprise reveals marketplace pressures at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama.
In Festive Enterprise, Jill P. Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. Resisting the conventional divide between medieval and Renaissance, Festive Enterprise takes a trans-Reformation view of dramaturgical strategies, which reflected the need to generate both income and audience assent. By analyzing a wide range of genres (such as civic ceremonial, mummings, interludes, scripted plays, and university drama) and a diverse range of venues (including great halls, city streets, the Inns of Court, and public playhouses), Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers' techniques to signal commun
Trade Review
“The virtue of Festive Enterprise is to situate famous plays from the era in a detailed historical context that helps to illuminate the achievement of Shakespeare and some of his better-known contemporaries. It’s a solid and significant contribution to the scholarship of medieval and Renaissance drama in England.” —Paul A. Cantor, author of Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy
Indeed, as an innovative, deeply detailed study of Renaissance drama's interrelation with pre-commercial economic practices, Festive Enterprise deserves much applause: it reveals the humanity and sense of community in the rise of theatrical commercialism. —Journal of British Studies
"Economically and precisely expressed, packed full of detail and useful information, and consistently lively and entertaining." —The English Historical Review
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. The Festive Gatherer and the Empathetic Thief: The Genealogy of a Character
2. Forms of Investment: Mummings, Prologues and Epilogues
3. Reconciliation in The Winter’s Tale: Devotion and Commerce from Guilds to Church Ales
4. The Mobile Entertainer: John Taylor’s Penniless Pilgrimage
5. Coding Complaint in Gesta Grayorum and The Christmas Prince
6. “A Jest’s Prosperity”: The Market, Marprelate, and Love’s Labour’s Lost
Conclusion
