Spectacular Performances: Essays on Theatre, Imagery, Books, and Selves in Early Modern England

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Why did Queen Elizabeth I compare herself with her disastrous ancestor Richard II? Why would Ben Jonson transform Queen Anne and her ladies into Amazons as entertainment for the pacifist King James? How do the concepts of costume as high fashion and as self-fashioning, as disguise and as the very essence of theatre, relate to one other? How do port

Stephen Orgel is J. E. Reynolds Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University. -- .

'He lays before us verbal and visual representations of title-pages, frontispieces, stage and costume designs by Inigo Jones, architectural splendors, portraits, maps, stage productions over the centuries, and still more, all informed by an extensive command of art history, intellectual history, humanist learning, the history of book illustration, and above all the history of every kind of theatrical representation. Stephen Orgel is himself the embodiment of the humanist scholar, and this present book is a rich repository of that great tradition...The present volume is a splendid collection of his work at its best.' DAVID BEVINGTON, University of Chicago, Renaissance Quarterly -- .