Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's "Pericles."
- Author/Editor
- Gillen, Katherine A.
- Title
- Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's "Pericles."
- Published
- Gillen, Katherine A. "Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale's Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins's Pericles." In James D. Maddock and Kathryn R. McPherson, eds. Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), pp. 171-93.
- Review
- Gillen seeks to '"illuminiate continuities and disjunctions between early Protestant drama and the commercial drama of William Shakespeare's stage" (172), in order to show that early modern drama is both '"reformed" and '"reforming." Her example of Protestant drama are the biblical plays of John Bale, whose 1544 "Epistle Exhortatory of an English Christian" vigorously condemned public theater; "Pericles" (crediting acts 1 and 2 to George Wilkins and 3-5 to Shakespeare) provides the commercial theatre test case. In each she focuses on the narrator figure: Baleus Prolocutor, and Gower. '"Gower's shifting role and his changing relation to dramatic action . . . are not merely indications of Shakespeare's stylistic preferences but are also reflective of Shakespeare's attempt to articulate the mimetic power and social role of public theater in light of antitheatrical objections" (174). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2014
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion