Early Modern Drama at the Universities : Institutions, Intertexts, Individuals

This is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama during the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical worlds of England's 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 journey--from 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. 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. "This is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama in the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical experiences of students at university in early modern England, following them on the journey from schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace. Early Modern Drama at the Universities is structured to make the subject as accessible as possible, mitigating the difficulties of this sizeable and complex body of evidence. The hundreds of plays we have inherited from Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in Classical culture, and the academic establishment's bias against print culture means that most evidence remains in manuscript form. Opening up these plays to a wider readership, this study carves three main roads into the corpus, introducing key institutions, intertexts, and individuals. For the first time we can see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it is: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and self-reflexive. Early Modern Drama at the Universities argues that it was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked, and proved themselves to the community, and that if we are to understand university drama as a whole, we must create it from the building blocks of individual college histories."-- Back cover Explores early modern university plays from Oxford and Cambridge and the extent to which participation in university drama influenced the experiences of early modern students. Studies Latin plays to investigate the links between theatre, ritual, and ceremony to show how theatrical performance could confer status and membership within the academy.