Overview

The first history of drama at the universities in the Tudor and Stuart periods. It guides the reader through the theatrical worlds of Englands universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Drama at the Universities opens up an exciting and challenging body of evidence and offers the reader a choice of three inroads into the corpus: institutions, intertexts, and individuals. How to get noticed at university? How to get into university in the first place, or a job afterwards? Sandis pinpoints the skills that were required for success and the role of playwriting and performance in the development of those skills. We follow Oxford and Cambridge students along their educational journeyfrom schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace. For the first time, we see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it was: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and self-reflexive. It was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked, and proved themselves to the community. Therefore, this study argues, to understand university drama as a whole we must recreate it from the building blocks of individual college histories. The hundreds of plays that we have inherited from Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in Classical culture; many are written in Latin. Manuscript, not print, was the accepted medium for keeping records of student plays, and these handwritten copies were unique and personal. It is time to recognize these plays in the context of early modern English drama, to uncover the culture of drama at the universities where many leading playwrights of the age were trained.

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9780192857132

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Reviews

Scrupulously researched [...] Both current and future students have reason to be grateful to...Elizabeth Sandis for providing a mass of new material and original perspectives which restore this important corpus to its deserved prominence. * Paul Dean, English Studies * This insightful, detailed monograph examines a topic that has only occasionally been treated. [The] approach is compelling. [...] Early Modern Drama at the Universities is an important contribution. * Daniel Blank, Review of English Studies * [A] testament to the rigor and solidity of the author's scholarship. [...] Early Modern Drama at the Universities makes a very valuable contribution to this understudied area of theater studies; it has been extensively and intelligently researched, it is fluently written, and it opens up new perspectives which scholars in the future would do well to explore. [...] Elizabeth Sandis-clearly a scholar of rich promise. * Richard Rowland, Modern Philology *

Author Information

Elizabeth Sandis is a theatre historian and Classical scholar at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her articles have been published in high-ranking, peer-reviewed journals including Renaissance Studies, Renaissance Drama, The Seventeenth Century, and Shakespeare Survey. She completed her doctorate at Merton College, Oxford, in 2016 before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. She now works in cancer care for the NHS.

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