| dc.contributor.author | Hill, Janet. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:38:06Z | |
| dc.date.available | 1998 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1998 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ36555 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55566 | |
| dc.description | This work is about the guild drama of late medieval England and the strategies of address that developed in that drama. For two hundred years, audiences gathered in the streets and markets of towns all over England to watch plays that were financed, produced, and acted in by their local guilds. As England's provincial trade guilds suffered economic reversals, and as the nation's religious affiliations shifted, so theatrical playing conditions changed. In the Tudor period, many guildsmen took to the roads, becoming professional actors. During the early to mid-sixteenth century, small groups of professional players roamed England, setting up temporary stages, not in their home towns, but in the dining halls of the gentry or in inn-yards. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, commercial playhouses were established in London. Now playgoers paid to enter permanent theatres, to see plays acted by wholly professional companies, on fixed stages. Despite these changes in the playing conditions and auspices, Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean popular dramatic performances were linked to the guild drama by a continuous tradition of strategies of address. | en_US |
| dc.description | Each guild play relentlessly acknowledged the presence of its audience, speaking openly to the people crowding the streets. I call this stage strategy "open address." Open address was not an archaic dramaturgical device. Rather, it was a powerful technique for connecting each play to its audience. In guild drama, open address reminded the playgoers to bring their modern daily reality to bear on their understanding of the play. Under new playing conditions, the convention of open address changed but it survived. In Tudor drama's more unstable relationship with its playgoers, acknowledging audience presence through open address constructed the play as play and the audience as audience. In Shakespeare's commercial playhouse, open address---often called the "aside," "soliloquy," "monologue," "chorus," "prologue"---continued to forge an alliance with the audience. At the beginning of his career, Shakespeare restrained the plays within the bounds of his big bare stage, and did not openly acknowledge the presence of the playgoers. Gradually, however, he returned to the more interesting, more difficult, and more sophisticated address that he learned from the guild plays. He reshaped the old techniques of open address for the new stage space, the commercial scaffold, bringing the world of his audience into his plays. | en_US |
| dc.description | My aim in this work is to recover the contract guild drama made with the townspeople who produced it and who watched it, and to show how the sophisticated strategies for addressing that audience became the continuous tradition in English popular drama. Shakespeare, son of a guildsman, was heir to this tradition. The particular vitality of English popular drama's exchange with its audiences dates not from Shakespeare but from the way the guild plays deeply engaged the late medieval crowds. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1998. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Theater. | en_US |
| dc.subject | Literature, English. | en_US |
| dc.title | Open address from the guild plays to Shakespeare. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
