The Theatrical Representations and Their Vicissitudes in Early Modern and Modern English Literary Culture

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Our research project which is to investigate the cultural concepts of theatre and drama in early modern and modern English Culture is divided into two parts: the first part consists of establishing some working and analytical principles which will make data processing manageable and rationalized ; the second part proceeding simultaneously consists of historical analysis. The first one is half accomplished only to leave data base construction incomplete (we will further continue this construction by using our classification system). The second one, historical analysis, results in an insight which will cast a definitely new light upon the historical and cultural importance of Shakespeare. The seventeenth-century England witnessed some now concepts of playwrights, concepts which inseparable form theatrical representations, made author-playwrights as well as their theatrical products transcendental authoritative, and independent from social and historical contexts. To our surprise, this ne … More w concept was reflected and produced in a portrait of Shakespeare printed on the front page of his first collection of plays published in 1623. This cultural change was extremely influential and even today's concepts of plays and playwrights are still partially under this seventeenth-century originated concept, In the eighteenth century Shakespearean studies became matured and consolidated, but as our investigation of some special case (the impostor W-H Ireland affair), has significantly shown, this was the historical moment in which forged and fictionalized images of authors were abundantly circulated. Those images, whether purely imaginative or quasi-objective, were an index to some cultural impulse, or basic instinct to shape authors and their products in that culture's socio-historical images. Hugely historical and cultural transformations the twentieth-century drama experienced have brought to light some theatrical and dramatic elements hitherto unrecognized, elements which are profoundly concerned with gender and gender transformation. Politics and poetics of queering performative arts in general are not culturally faddish at all but proper and logical results of those arts which have traditionally accorded cultural privileges upon gender transformation and its unknown possibilities. In this respect, Shakespearean dramas are not exceptional. Less