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  3. The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy
  • Cited by 48
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      03 June 2023
      10 March 2011
      ISBN:
      9780511758577
      9781107003088
      9781107463226
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511758577
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.53kg, 270 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.4kg, 270 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature
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    Subjects:
    Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature
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    Book description

    What is wit made out of in the comedies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Shirley and their contemporaries? What does it hide? What does it reveal? This book addresses these questions by turning to the relationship between comic form and local history. Explorations of familiar sites, including Windsor Forest, Smithfield, Covent Garden and Hyde Park, are matched with close readings of drama that focus on overlays between theatrical, spatial, narrative and social conventions. Dramatic comedy's definitive interest in cultural competency and incompetence, and wit and witlessness, is revealed through discussions of commerce, gambling, royal forests and new or newly public spaces in and around early modern London. Along with Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Ben Jonson's Epicene and Bartholomew Fair, special emphasis is placed on the neglected town comedies of the 1630s - the forerunners of the Restoration comedy of manners and the satirical realism of our own day.

    Awards

    Shortlisted for the Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2012

    Reviews

    'This is a beautifully written book, often as witty as the cunning and eloquent characters whose staged urban triumphs it examines.'

    Michael Dobson Source: Around the Globe

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    Contents

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