Search results for ""Author Thomas Dekker""

Thomas Dekker's singular comic drama, The Shoemakers' Holiday moves through the urban landscape of 16th century apprenticeships and artisan production in this tale of thwarted marriages and class division. Simon Eyre and his rags to riches journey to becoming the city's Lord Mayor embroils a host of lively characters who find themselves in the generative setting of the shoemakers' workshop. Whether it be Roland Lacy, who abandons his military duties under the guise of a Dutch shoemaker to stay close to Rose Oatley, his love interest, or Ralph Damport, a journeyman shoemaker, who cannot escape conscription and finds himself separated from his wife Jane with the appearance of an elusive shoe providing the only chance of reunion. Dekker's comedy focuses on the early modern tensions between urban artisans, wealthy merchants and the landed aristocracy. Through these relationships he explores gender, immigration and disability, mixing acute social commentary within the promise of f

Read more less

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A rumbustious Elizabethan comedy featuring identity fraud, love triangles and a marriage proposal disguised as a shoe fitting. Thomas Dekker's play The Shoemaker's Holiday was first staged in London in 1599. This edition of the play, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is edited and introduced by Peter J. Smith.

Read more less

A hilarious city comedy by the authors of A Mad World, My Masters and The Shoemaker's Holiday. Sebastian has a problem. He's in love with a girl but his father won't agree to their marriage. In desperation he turns to the one person who can help him, the fearless and feisty 'roaring girl' Moll Cutpurse. In a London fuelled by greed and desire, the charismatic, cross-dressing heroine Moll has the world wrapped around her little finger, and she has a plan. Cutting a joyously independent path through the underhand scheming and petty vendettas of the London underworld, Moll proves more than a match for any man. This Prompt Book edition of The Roaring Girl was published alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company's revival of the play in 2014, and features the text edited for the RSC production, and introductions by key members of its creative team.

Read more less

'I have success, money, women. I've been lionised by the public and the media. The world is at my feet. I've spread my wings and here I am, soaring above everything and everyone. But in reality, the descent has already begun.' Thomas Dekker was set to become one of pro cycling’s superstars. But before long, he found himself sucked in by the lure of hedonistic highs and troubled by the intense pressure to perform. In The Descent, Dekker tells his story of hotel room blood bags, shady rendezvous with drug dealers and late-night partying at the Tour de France. This is Dekker’s journey from youthful idealism to a sordid path of excess and doping that lays bare cycling’s darkest secrets like never before.

Read more less

In the village of Edmonton, Elizabeth Sawyer is shunned by her neighbours. A poor and lonely old woman, she is harassed and accused of being a witch. In her abject misery, she wishes that she really were bewitched and so able to have her revenge. Unluckily for Elizabeth and the villagers of Edmonton, someone with the power to grant that wish is listening. First performed in 1621, The Witch of Edmonton was based by its authors Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley on a real-life case of a woman accused of witchcraft. The play was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of its 2014 Roaring Girls season, in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran and with Eileen Atkins as Elizabeth Sawyer. This Prompt Book edition of the play features the text edited for the RSC production, and introductions by key members of its creative team, including Doran.

Read more less

Written and first performed in 1599, The Shoemaker's Holiday was the most popular non-Shakespearean comedy of its day—a hearty brew of character and overflowing good humor, occasionally ribald, about the gentle craft of shoemaking. Bernard Sahlins's new adaptation streamlines the dialogue for contemporary audiences and makes it extremely playable.

Read more less

Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's Holiday George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston: Eastward Ho! Ben Jonson: Every Man In His Humour Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker: The Roaring Girl Oxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographies illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike. 'The series should reshape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Read more less

This Jacobean city comedy is a curiosity in that it presents a real-life character, the notorious cross-dresser Moll Frith, who probably was among the first audiences of 'her' play before she was taken up for public misconduct. Middleton and Dekker's 'roaring girl' may outrage her society with her pipe, bluster and swagger, but she turns out to be the moral centre of the play. Her code of honour leads her to call the bluff on rogues and conspicuous consumers, to thrash a hypocritical gallant in a duel, and to act as go-between for the young lovers thwarted by parental tyranny. This wry dramatisation of female deviancy exposing male ineffectuality is as much to the point today as it was in King James's England. An appendix helps the modern reader to appreciate the canting terms used by the low-life characters.

Read more less

The titular “Roaring Girl” of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s comedy is Moll Cutpurse, a fictionalized version of Mary Frith, who attained legendary status in London by flouting gendered dress conventions, illegally performing onstage, and engaging in all manner of transgressive behavior from smoking and swearing to stealing. In the course of The Roaring Girl’s lively and complex plot of seduction and clever ruses, Moll shares her views on gender and sexuality, defends her honor in a duel, and demonstrates her knowledge of London’s criminal underworld. This edition of the play offers an informative introduction, thorough annotation, and a substantial selection of contextual materials from the period.

Read more less

This Norton Critical Edition of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl is based on the text from English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. It is accompanied by generous explanatory annotations, five illustrations, and a detailed introduction. “Contexts” is thematically arranged to include almost all known documents from the period concerning Mary Frith (aka Moll Cutpurse), among them records of her court appearances, letters recounting the same, and her last will. Also reprinted are significant passages from her purported 1662 “autobiography,” The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. While of dubious veracity, the “autobiography” is useful for comparing the play’s portrayal of Moll with later developments in Moll Cutpurse lore, which the Norton Critical Edition traces through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps most engaging for classroom discussion are substantial excerpts from the 1620 cross-dressing pamphlets—Hic Mulier; or, The Man-Woman and Haec Vir; or, The Womanish Man—which appear in annotated, modern-spelling versions. Together they give insight into how gender-bending trends in clothing, similar to those practiced by Moll, were understood in the early seventeenth century. A related passage from A Sermon of Apparel adds another perspective on cross-dressing practices. Fourteen critical essays chart the development of scholarly interest in The Roaring Girl, from the first half of the twentieth century, when the play received only passing reference, through the work on city comedy in the 1970s and 1980s, to the explosion of analyses in the late 1980s and 1990s, when the play became a major focus for early modern gender studies. The more recent critical essays move beyond a strict focus on gender and cross-dressing to explore The Roaring Girl’s depiction of other aspects of early modern London, including consumer culture and the contemporary fascination with the language of the criminal underworld. Contributors include, among others, T. S. Eliot, Alexander Leggatt, Mary Beth Rose, Jonathan Dollimore, Jean E. Howard, and Jonathan Gil Harris. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Read more less

At the center of this remarkable 1621 play is the story of Elizabeth Sawyer, the titular "Witch of Edmonton," a woman who had in fact been executed for the crime of witchcraft mere months before the play's first performance. Yet hers is only one of several plots that animate The Witch of Edmonton. Blending sensational drama with domestic tragedy and comic farce, this complex and multi-layered play by Dekker, Ford, and Rowley emphasizes the mundane realities and interpersonal conflicts that are so often at the heart of sensational occurrences. This edition of their work offers a compelling and informative introduction, thorough annotation, and a selection of contextual materials that helps set the play in the context of the "witch-craze" of Jacobean England.

Read more less

Arden of Faversham * A Woman Killed with Kindness * The Witch of Edmonton * The English Traveller In about 1590, an unknown dramatist had the idea of writing a tragedy about the lives of ordinary people, instead of the genre's usual complement of kings and queens and politicians. His play, Arden of Faversham, inaugurated a new genre of 'domestic' drama, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage, crime, and property rather than war and power. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend, only to find that he takes unusual reprisals. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected and unwelcome changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts; a critical introduction that outlines the way all four plays raise powerful and complex questions about the English society in which their tragic events unfold; wide-ranging notes; a chronology of the plays from their sources to recent performance; and appendices relating to two of the plays: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Heywood write The English Traveller. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Read more less