Description
Book SynopsisThis book offers scholars and students of literary, theatrical, and women's history the first full-length critical study of an important Renaissance genre. Country house entertainments, short plays staged for the Queen at country estates (15711602), enabled men and women to engage in crucial political and literary debates in Elizabethan England.
Trade Review'… its virtue is that it assembles such a wide array of materials that Kolkovich has researched comprehensively. This monograph will appeal to readers with interests in performance studies, print history, gender politics, and the uneven development of English nationhood.' Eric Song, Modern Philology
'Kolkovich's detailed and well-researched study of Elizabethan country-house entertainments places them within a variety of relevant contexts, showing how these events, though sometimes rather gnomic, can illuminate the interweaving of gender, nation, family, and hierarchy in Elizabethan politics and culture. … an excellent starting point for further investigation of these fascinating performances and the texts and other forms of evidence that remain of them.' Susan L. Anderson, Renaissance Quarterly
'Recent interdisciplinary studies have done much to deepen our understanding of the significance of such entertainments, yet there remains room for a work that synthesizes and expands on such studies and explores the entertainments in the context of broader academic debates. Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich's detailed critical study of Elizabethan country house entertainment achieves this by exploring how the entertainments staged for the Queen functioned in the formation and negotiation of religious, gender, regional, and national identities.' Susan Flavin, Sixteenth Century Journal
Table of ContentsIntroduction; Part I. Performance: 1. Negotiating in a 'strange Country': Theobalds, Kenilworth, and the local politics of country house performance; 2. 'Your Majesty on my knees will I followe': performing gender and the courtier-monarch relationship; 3. An 'abundance of dainties': hospitality and housewifery at Elvetham, Mitcham, and Harefield; Part II. Print: 4. 'Pleasures by a profitable publication': publishers and readers of printed entertainment; 5. 'Set this downe in English': Cowdray, Elvetham, and printed pageantry as national news; 6. 'This paper, which carieth so base names': the Sidneys, authorship, and printed pageantry as literature; Epilogue.
