Books by David J Amelang
This book compares the theatrical cultures of early modern England and Spain and explores the cau... more This book compares the theatrical cultures of early modern England and Spain and explores the causes and consequences not just of the remarkable similarities but also of the visible differences between them. An exercise in multi-focal theatre history research, it deploys a wide range of perspectives and evidence to recreate the theatrical landscapes of these two countries and thus better to understand how the specific conditions of performance actively contributed to the development of each country’s dramatic literature. This monograph develops an innovative comparative framework within which to explore the numerous similarities, as well as the notable differences, between early modern Europe’s two most prominent commercial theatre cultures. By highlighting the nuances and intricacies that make each theatrical culture unique while never losing sight of the fact that the two belong to the same broader cultural ecosystem, its dual focus should appeal to scholars and students of English and Spanish literature alike, as well as those interested in the broader history of European theatre. Learning from what one ‘playground’ – that is, the environment and circumstances out of which a dramatic tradition originates – reveals about the other will help solve not only the questions posed above but also others that still await examination.
This investigation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre
history, comparative drama, early modern drama, and performance culture.
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Journal Articles by David J Amelang
Comparative Drama, 2024
"Any person taking their first steps into the wide and complex world of early modern comparative ... more "Any person taking their first steps into the wide and complex world of early modern comparative theatre history immediately confronts one basic fact: that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was divided into territories that allowed women to act professionally and territories that banned them from doing so. In the commercial theatres of Shakespeare’s England, most famously, adolescent boys were charged with performing all female roles, whereas at exactly the same time in countries such as Italy, France, and Spain actresses were considered the stars of their industries. This division was not sculpted in stone, with some nations wavering back and forth on how to handle what authorities broadly perceived as a choice between the lesser of two evils: having either women or young cross-dressed men commanding attention on the nation’s public stages. Needless to say, depending on which laws and customs were in effect, dramatists had to adapt and adjust the way they wrote plays to the realities—and limitations—of their cultures of performance. It stands to reason that it would have been quite different to create a role for a young boy who was just getting started in the business of playing than for an established celebrity actress who was broadly seen as the main attraction in the eyes of the theatregoing public. [...]"
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Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 2024
The recent (2014) inauguration of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a reconstruction of an archetypal ... more The recent (2014) inauguration of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a reconstruction of an archetypal Jacobean indoor playhouse, on London’s Southbank, has led students and scholars of early modern theatre once again to focus attention on original playhouse performances, just as they did when its older sibling Shakespeare’s Globe opened its doors in 1996. The earlier assumption that the differences between open-air amphitheatres and indoor playhouses conditioned the way plays were written and acted is now enjoying a new lease on life, and yet there has been little research conducted in order to substantiate this otherwise perfectly logical intuition. Drawing on the insights of drama theorist Manfred Pfister as well as the linguistic concept of deixis, this article compares the language and plotting of three plays by the Jacobean playwright John Webster: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi and The Devil’s Law Case. Each play was first staged under significantly different circumstances within the theatrical landscape of Jacobean London, which makes them a singularly illustrative case study of how an early modern English dramatist adapted his style in order to meet the demands of the city’s diverse performance conditions.
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Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del Siglo de Oro, 2023
Este artículo visibiliza el uso que se le puede dar a una serie de proyectos de Humanidades Digit... more Este artículo visibiliza el uso que se le puede dar a una serie de proyectos de Humanidades Digitales, como son las bases de datos de Rolecall, DICAT y CATCOM o la biblioteca digital EMOTHE, a la hora de analizar las dinámicas escenográficas en el teatro español de finales del siglo XVI y principios del siglo XVII, coincidiendo con las décadas en activo del máximo representante de la comedia nueva, Lope de Vega. En particular este estudio se centra en la presencia y el protagonismo de los personajes femeninos, e indaga en los múltiples factores que pueden haber influenciado en las dinámicas de género representadas sobre los tablados españoles y europeos de la edad moderna.
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Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo, 2021
Respondiendo al creciente interés por cuestiones de diversidad en la cultura y el entretenimiento... more Respondiendo al creciente interés por cuestiones de diversidad en la cultura y el entretenimiento actual, las instituciones académicas y artísticas dedicadas al teatro clásico español buscan reflejar estas nuevas tendencias en su selección de obras para ser estudiadas y/o representadas. Este esfuerzo de cambiar de aires plantea ciertos problemas, ya que por una parte existe una larga tradición de lectura consolidada alrededor de un núcleo relativamente pequeño de obras, y por otra no siempre es fácil establecer parámetros nuevos a la hora de intentar reformar dicho canon. Este artículo ilustra el potencial de las perspectivas y herramientas asociadas con las Humanidades Digitales para transformar nuestra manera de leer y apreciar los clásicos dramáticos del Siglo de Oro español. Con ese fin en mente, este texto examina un conjunto de proyectos digitales relacionados no solo con la España áureosecular sino también con otros culturas teatrales europeas (en particular la Inglaterra de Shakespeare) que plantean nuevas perspectivas desde las cuáles podemos aproximarnos a las obras de Lope de Vega, Calderón y otros dramaturgos de los siglos XVI y XVII.
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Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2019
One of the major differences between the otherwise very similar commercial theatrical cultures of... more One of the major differences between the otherwise very similar commercial theatrical cultures of early modern Spain and England was that, whereas in England female roles were performed by young, cross-dressed boys, in Spain female performers were prominent in their industry. indeed, actresses in Spain played an active role in the creative process of theater-making and could rise to lead their own acting companies and even write their own plays. With this distinction in mind, this article uses quantitative analysis to gauge how lope de vega and William Shakespeare-as contemporaries and leading dramatists of their respective countries-depicted female characters in their plays. A comparative measurement of the number of lines pronounced by female as opposed to male characters in the dramatic works of these two playwrights indicates a significant disparity between the two. this quantitative difference invites consideration of the presence-or lack thereof-of actresses in each of the two national theaters, with implications for the amount of speech, protagonism, and agency allocated to female characters in their respective plays.
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Anglia. Journal of English Philology / Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 2019
This article explores the change in dynamics between matter and style in Shakespeare’s way of dep... more This article explores the change in dynamics between matter and style in Shakespeare’s way of depicting distress on the early modern stage. During his early years as a dramatist, Shakespeare wrote plays filled with violence and death, but language did not lose its composure at the sight of blood and destruction; it kept on marching to the beat of the iambic drum. As his career progressed, however, the language of characters undergoing an overwhelming experience appears to become more permeable to their emotions, and in many cases sentiment takes over and interferes with the character’s ability to speak properly. That is, Shakespeare progressively imbued his depictions of distress with a degree of linguistic iconicity previously unheard of in Elizabethan commercial drama. By focusing on the linguistic properties of three passages of iconic distress – Hamlet’s first soliloquy, Othello’s jealous rant, and King Lear’s dying words – this article analyses the rhetorical adjustments Shakespeare undertook in his effort to raise the level of verisimilitude of emotional speech in his plays.
https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ang.2019.137.issue-1/ang-2019-0003/ang-2019-0003.xml
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Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2018
Going to the theater was one of the most distinctive-as well as conspicuous-cultural activities t... more Going to the theater was one of the most distinctive-as well as conspicuous-cultural activities to take place regularly in early modern european cities. Precisely because so many people from all walks of life partook of this highly visible pastime, public theaters became spaces wherein social and cultural boundaries between spectators were easily (and sometimes purposefully) blurred. By focusing on the performative dimension of playgoing in Madrid and london, Western europe's two strongholds of public theater during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this study probes some of the social meanings and intentions underlying the practice of attending commercial theater performances in these two capitals.
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Renaissance Quarterly, 2018
Comparative studies have revealed uncanny similarities between the theatrical cultures of Shakesp... more Comparative studies have revealed uncanny similarities between the theatrical cultures of Shakespearean England and Golden Age Spain, and in particular between the Elizabethan amphitheaters and the Spanish corrales de comedia (courtyard playhouses). Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, Spain’s (and, in particular, Madrid’s) courtyard theaters may have resembled the English indoor public playhouses, especially London’s Blackfriars, more than the Globe-like amphitheaters with which they are so often matched. That the corrales could simultaneously play the part of both Globe and Blackfriars also helps account for the absence of indoor public playhouses in Habsburg Spain.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/698142?journalCode=rq
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Sederi, 2017
This article explores how certain dramatists in early modern England and in Spain, specifically B... more This article explores how certain dramatists in early modern England and in Spain, specifically Ben Jonson and Miguel de Cervantes (with much more emphasis on the former), pursued authority over texts by claiming as their own a new realm which had not been available—or, more accurately, as prominently available—to playwrights before: the stage directions in printed plays. The way both these playwrights and/or their publishers dealt with the transcription of stage directions provides perhaps the clearest example of a theatrical convention translated into the realm of readership.
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Shakespeare Seminar, 2015
With the character Ophelia Shakespeare draws attention to what we can identify as conventions of ... more With the character Ophelia Shakespeare draws attention to what we can identify as conventions of the heroine in Elizabethan revenge tragedy, exemplified, for example by Bel-Imperia, the heroine of The Spanish Tragedy. The focus of this paper is on acts 1 to 3 prior to Ophelia’s madness, which has usually been the focus of interpretation. While Shakespeare’s plays, in particular the ones written before Hamlet, are all marked by multifaceted female characters who, in their complexity, have no counterpart in the sources that Shakespeare used when writing these plays, it is in Ophelia that we see a departure from generic conventions most clearly. This paper addresses the question what may have prompted Shakespeare to develop this new type of heroine. Contrasting Ophelia and Bel-Imperia, it is arguably the changing norms and hence the shifting role of the gentlewomen in Shakespeare’s London, evidenced in conduct books, that served as an inspiration for the character Ophelia prior to her turning mad.
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Book Chapters by David J Amelang
Poetic Theory and Practice in Early Modern Verse: Unwritten Arts, 2023
Among the many colourful descriptions George Puttenham provided for classical rhetorical figures ... more Among the many colourful descriptions George Puttenham provided for classical rhetorical figures in his The Arte of English Poesie (1589), one of the more eye-catching was his translation of aposiopesis, which he vernacularised into ‘the figure of silence’. It is, he writes, “when we begin to speak a thing and break off in the middle way, as if it either needed no further to be spoken of, or that we were ashamed or afraid to speak it out”. Puttenham was not alone in highlighting the uniquely performative value of this figure of speech, as many of the rhetorical and poetic treatises written in 16th-century England also expound on the effectiveness of aposiopesis to artificially convey natural ineloquence. That said, despite its relative prominence and endorsement in these theoretical manuals, aposiopesis and other rhetorical devices with similar descriptors are rarely found in Elizabethan verse, and almost never with the purpose Puttenham and his contemporaries ascribed to them. This chapter, conceived within the framework of a project that aims to shed light on under-scrutinised poetic practices and practitioners in Elizabethan England, explores the relationship between precept and practice regarding the ‘poetics of ineloquence’ in English poetry during the last decades of the 16th century. The objective of comparing the codification and use of such rhetorical devices in different late-Elizabethan lyrical texts is better to understand the place of seemingly unpoetic language in a literary culture generally defined by its predilection for rhetorical elegance, artificiality and ornament.
With this goal in mind, this chapter focuses on four different types of poetic texts present in England towards the end of the 16th century. The first is the rhetorical treatise or manual, in which the different figures (along with their poetic functions) are described; the features lyrical poems in which the subject matter of the poem justified the presence of verbal ineloquence; the third includes narrative poems of a similar profile; the last, and as a generic counterpoint, features some excerpts from dramatic texts in which figures such as aposiopesis are prominent as well. By juxtaposing these four genres of poetry, or poetry-adjacent literature, this chapter maps the correlation between the different existing genres of verse-writing and the growth in appreciation of unpoetic language during the late Elizabethan period.
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“La vida como obra de arte”: Essays in Memory of John Jay Allen, 2021
Entre las contribuciones más relevantes de John J. Allen al estudio de la literatura española se ... more Entre las contribuciones más relevantes de John J. Allen al estudio de la literatura española se encuentra el estudio comparado entre los corrales de comedias del Siglo de Oro español y los anfiteatros públicos de la Inglaterra shakespeariana. Las semejanzas entre los dos tipos de edificios son sorprendentes, especialmente si se tiene en cuenta la falta de comunicación que había en aquellos tiempos entre las comunidades teatrales de ambos países. Pero también existían diferencias importantes, y entre ellas destaca la cantidad: mientras que en España hay documentación de aproximadamente un centenar de corrales construidos durante los siglos XVI y XVII y distribuidos por toda la Península Ibérica, durante ese mismo periodo sólo podemos hablar de aproximadamente una docena de teatros públicos en Inglaterra, casi todos ubicados en Londres. Tomando como punto de partida las particularidades arquitectónicas de los espacios escénicos de ambos países, este capítulo analiza los factores que explican esta abrumadora disparidad numérica.
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Mirando desde el puente. Estudios en homenaje al profesor James S. Amelang, 2019
"Hace ya veintiséis años se publicó una colección de ensayos en homenaje a la historiadora Natali... more "Hace ya veintiséis años se publicó una colección de ensayos en homenaje a la historiadora Natalie Zemon Davis que incluía un capítulo llamado “People of the Ribera: Popular Politics and Neighborhood Identity in Early Modern Barcelona”. En él, su autor, a quien ahora dedicamos esta obra, delinea brevemente una metodología para analizar el perfil social y cultural de un barrio popular en una ciudad de la España moderna, en su caso la Ribera de Barcelona, a partir de una serie de preguntas..."
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Book Reviews and Performance Reviews by David J Amelang
Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2024
"'For what is a play without a woman in it?' The epigraph that launches Pamela Allen Brown's book... more "'For what is a play without a woman in it?' The epigraph that launches Pamela Allen Brown's book is the startling rhetorical question posed by Hieronimo, the protagonist of Thomas Kyd's blockbuster The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1580s), as he is casting his climactic play-within-a-play that will serve as the revenge tragedy's grand finale (qtd. 1). He proclaims this in order to justify placing Bel-Imperia, the play's heroine and one of the most prominent female leads of the Elizabethan stage, at the center of his plot to avenge the murder of his son (who was also her lover). Bel-Imperia's own thirst for vengeance and her flair for the dramatic makes her the perfect choice for the part, a vehicle specifically designed to showcase her unquestionable stardom. The irony of Hieronimo's question is that at the time Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy, women were not allowed to perform in the country's main public theaters; that is, Bel-Imperia and all other female roles in Kyd's and Shakespeare's England were played by cross-dressed boys, young performers more akin to apprentices than to stars. Thus, the answer to "what is a play without a woman in it?" is, at least on one basic level, any Shakespeare-era play. But of course, that is actually not the case: the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporary English dramatists are rich in captivating female roles. In fact, many of the heroines of the Shakespearean stage are remarkably similar to the ones found in plays written in countries that allowed women to perform professionally, such as Italy, Spain, or France. This common ground is noteworthy not only because of the absence or presence of professional actresses in one and another countries, but also because Elizabethan and Jacobean England's theatrical culture is often discussed as if it were on the margins of continental Europe's playmaking ways-on the outside looking in. Here is where Brown's new book comes into play: by outlining the many tropes, themes, and conventions English dramatists adopted from the Italian theater-makers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage reinserts the plays of Shakespearean England, so often analyzed and discussed as a literary island, into the broader dramatic tradition of early modern Europe. [...]"
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2022
"Dian Fox opens her Hercules and the King of Portugal by posing the question of 'how do represent... more "Dian Fox opens her Hercules and the King of Portugal by posing the question of 'how do representations of masculinity figure in the fashioning of Spanish national identity' in the Iberian Peninsula during the seventeenth century(xiii). This monograph brings together Fox’s broad range of research interests in a study that combines historical research, literary criticism, cultural studies, and theories of gender and sexuality to analyze the way in which Golden Age dramatists, predominantly Calderón de la Barca, negotiated social and cultural constructs of gender, honor, and nationhood in baroque Spain. In particular, Fox’s study shines a spotlight on a pair of markedly iconic characters that appear as recurring lightning rods for these concerns in the plays of Calderón and his contemporaries: the mythological hero Hercules and Sebastian of Aviz, the king of Portugal from 1559 to 1578...."
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Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 2022
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Renaissance Quarterly, 2021
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Early Modern Digital Review & Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 2020
"Teatro Clásico Español is a free online platform that offers its visitors access to the largest ... more "Teatro Clásico Español is a free online platform that offers its visitors access to the largest collection of digitized images and texts of Spanish classical drama. Directed since 2013 by Germán Vega García-Luengos from the Universidad de Valladolid, it was developed within the broader framework of the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes digital library (Universidad de Alicante) as one of its various specialized collections. While currently focused on the plays of what is commonly known as the Spanish Golden Age of drama (ca. 1570–1700), Teatro Clásico Español seeks eventually to continue to expand well beyond the boundaries of the early modern period and to house an even broader range of textual ensembles. ..."
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The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2020
"We currently find ourselves at a peak moment in the importance and visibility of Spanish baroque... more "We currently find ourselves at a peak moment in the importance and visibility of Spanish baroque drama within the eminently Shakespearean community of Anglophone early modern literary studies. Capitalizing on this momentum , Norton's timely publication of its new anthology The Golden Age of Spanish Drama both testifies to this academic trend and pushes the ball forward with its new and accessible translations into English of some of the period's most important plays written by Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and their contemporaries . Curated by Barbara Fuchs, who has proven to be one of the most accomplished scholars to bridge the gap between the study of early modern English and Spanish literature, this anthology includes five of the most iconic dramatic works written in the Spanish-speaking world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries..."
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Books by David J Amelang
This investigation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre
history, comparative drama, early modern drama, and performance culture.
Journal Articles by David J Amelang
https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ang.2019.137.issue-1/ang-2019-0003/ang-2019-0003.xml
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/698142?journalCode=rq
Book Chapters by David J Amelang
With this goal in mind, this chapter focuses on four different types of poetic texts present in England towards the end of the 16th century. The first is the rhetorical treatise or manual, in which the different figures (along with their poetic functions) are described; the features lyrical poems in which the subject matter of the poem justified the presence of verbal ineloquence; the third includes narrative poems of a similar profile; the last, and as a generic counterpoint, features some excerpts from dramatic texts in which figures such as aposiopesis are prominent as well. By juxtaposing these four genres of poetry, or poetry-adjacent literature, this chapter maps the correlation between the different existing genres of verse-writing and the growth in appreciation of unpoetic language during the late Elizabethan period.
Book Reviews and Performance Reviews by David J Amelang
This investigation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre
history, comparative drama, early modern drama, and performance culture.
https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ang.2019.137.issue-1/ang-2019-0003/ang-2019-0003.xml
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/698142?journalCode=rq
With this goal in mind, this chapter focuses on four different types of poetic texts present in England towards the end of the 16th century. The first is the rhetorical treatise or manual, in which the different figures (along with their poetic functions) are described; the features lyrical poems in which the subject matter of the poem justified the presence of verbal ineloquence; the third includes narrative poems of a similar profile; the last, and as a generic counterpoint, features some excerpts from dramatic texts in which figures such as aposiopesis are prominent as well. By juxtaposing these four genres of poetry, or poetry-adjacent literature, this chapter maps the correlation between the different existing genres of verse-writing and the growth in appreciation of unpoetic language during the late Elizabethan period.
The first part of the lecture explores different elements of the context of performance in the playhouses of Elizabethan and Jacobean London in comparison with the corrales de comedia of Golden Age Madrid. The disposition of the two capitals’ theatre audiences, as well as the performance conditions of the different type of venues illustrate why both the similarities and differences between the London amphitheatres and the corrales of Madrid must always be kept in mind when understanding these two unique playworlds. The second half of the lecture reviews various instances in which these contextual attributes affected in specific ways the substance and style of dramatic writing in the age of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega.
While Rolecall’s current narrow focus on the differences between female and male characters does not address the broader complexities of the gender spectrum, we are moving to expand the database’s mission beyond its original scope. This is easier said than done, however, because relational databases such as Rolecall favour the organisation and presentation of information in clean-cut categories and/or dichotomies, leaving little to no room for nuance. This brief paper poses the question of how one can and should best represent the many third spaces that exist between the two extremes of the gender spectrum within a digital database model that seeks to represent the intricacies of the gender dynamics in the plays of Shakespeare and his early modern European contemporaries.
In particular I will be introducing the project's digital instrument: "Rolecall", a database currently in development that charts the quantitative differences between female speech and protagonism in the plays of early modern European dramatists. By juxtaposing the corpora of various English and Spanish playwrights, this presentation seeks both to showcase the utility and functionality of the database for early modern European theatre research as well as provide visual evidence of the way in which the presence and absence of actresses in one and another theatrical culture directly correlates with the amount of speech, protagonism and agency allocated to female characters in their plays.
This paper explores and compares what is known about the acoustic features of various acting spaces in early modern Europe. In particular, I will focus on the commercial theatres of Renaissance London and Madrid, since scholars of both dramatic traditions have frequently remarked the similarities between the Elizabethan open-air theatre and the Golden Age corral de comedias. My argument is that from an acoustic perspective, however, these uncannily similar-looking venues may have been much more different than traditionally thought. Indeed, Madrid’s corrales acoustically may have resembled the English indoor public playhouses more than the Globe-like amphitheatres with which they are so often matched. Moreover, the considerable difference in acoustic profiles between the theatres of these two cities may well account for the absence of indoor playhouses à la London’s Blackfriars in the Habsburg capital, which constitutes one of the major divergences between two theatrical cultures that otherwise led almost parallel lives.
This paper explores how the change in the nature of the audience for early modern theatre, from the late Elizabethan to today, has effectively and forever altered the plays themselves through the elimination of a key component of these dramatic works: the element of surprise. I will analyse specific instances of audience anagnorisis that with time have been rendered mute, as well as some of the consequences of this development. The aim is, through this exercise in retrospection, to understand better how early modern plays were meant to be experienced, and how Renaissance and Contemporary Shakespeare are, to a certain extent, two completely different authors.
This paper analyses the fractured language of a variety of characters overwhelmed by emotions, that is, characters undergoing sudden shock and distress, in conjunction with period descriptions of manifestations of humoral imbalance. In particular I will focus on three passages; Hamlet’s first soliloquy, Othello’s handkerchief rant and King Lear’s final words over the corpse of his daughter. Understanding these representations of ungovernable passion as one of Shakespeare’s singular literary achievements and for which he had practically no precedents, I intend to identify and illustrate some of the ways in which this dramatic innovation relates to broader contexts, and above all the discourse of madness and emotions in early modern English and European society.
Papers may approach the concept of gender from theoretical, historical, literary, performative or other perspectives: by keeping the range of possibilities purposefully broad, we seek to foment an eclectic and wide-ranging discussion as a way of helping us better to understand the full complexity of the gender relations and dynamics that have been unfolding on the stages of Europe from Shakespeare's time up until today.
The first half analyses the relationship between syntax and eloquence in these passages; sentence length, sentence complexity and pause patterns all gradually change to accommodate a new, less poetical form of versified language. The latter section explores Shakespeare’s changing use of rhetorical devices from the overtly artificial language of the early plays to a more realistic and natural style. As the title suggests, pattern and a systematic procedure sustain this new dialect of overwhelming emotions, and contribute to Shakespeare’s unprecedented success at depicting distress.