Download or read book Better a Shrew than a Sheep written by Pamela Allen Brown and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a study that explodes the assumption that early modern comic culture was created by men for men, Pamela Allen Brown shows that jest books, plays, and ballads represented women as laugh-getters and sought out the laughter of ordinary women. Disputing the claim that non-elite women had little access to popular culture because of their low literacy and social marginality, Brown demonstrates that women often bested all comers in the arenas of jesting, gaining a few heady moments of agency. Juxtaposing the literature of jest against court records, sermons, and conduct books, Brown employs a witty, entertaining style to propose that non-elite women used jests to test the limits of their subjection. She also shows how women's mocking laughter could function as a means of social control in closely watched neighborhoods. While official culture beatified the sheep-like wife and disciplined the scold, jesting culture often applauded the satiric shrew, whether her target was priest, cuckold, or rapist. Brown argues that listening for women's laughter can shed light on both the dramas of the street and those of the stage: plays from The Massacre of the Innocents to The Merry Wives of Windsor to The Woman's Prize taught audiences the importance of gossips' alliances as protection against slanderers, lechers, tyrants, and wife-beaters. Other jests, ballads, jigs, and plays show women reveling in tales of female roguery or scoffing at the perverse patience of Griselda. As Brown points out, some women found Griselda types annoying and even foolish: better be a shrew than a sheep.
Download or read book Better a Shrew Than a Sheep written by Pamela Brown and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Marriage and Violence written by Frances E. Dolan and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what—or who—must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan contends, that its logical consequence is conflict. Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime," and late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other. In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce conflict, both companionship and competition.
Download or read book The Winter s Tale Language and Writing written by Mario DiGangi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through expert guidance on understanding, interpreting, and writing about Shakespeare's language, this book makes The Winter's Tale accessible and exciting for students. It demonstrates that careful attention to Shakespeare's complex dramatic language can clarify the structure and concerns of the play, as well as provide deep and satisfying engagement with the social, political and ethical questions Shakespeare raises. Each chapter features a 'Writing Matters' section designed to connect analysis of Shakespeare's language to students' development of their own writing strategies. The book examines topics in the play such as tragicomic genre; women's assertion of social and political agency; obedience and resistance to rulers; the virtues and risks of following festivity, and disputes over the proper forms of religious devotion.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare s Queens written by Kavita Mudan Finn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, fifteen include queens. This collection gives these characters their due as powerful early modern women and agents of change, bringing together new perspectives from scholars of literature, history, theater, and the fine arts. Essays span Shakespeare’s career and cover a range of famous and lesser-known queens, from the furious Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays to the quietly powerful Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; from vengeful Tamora in Titus Andronicus to Lady Macbeth. Early chapters situate readers in the critical concerns underpinning any discussion of Shakespeare and queenship: the ambiguous figure of Elizabeth I, and the knotty issue of gender presentation. The focus then moves to analysis of issues such as motherhood, intertextuality, and contemporary political contexts; close readings of individual plays; and investigations of rhetoric and theatricality. Featuring twenty-five chapters with a rich variety of themes and methodologies, this handbook is an invaluable reference for students and scholars, and a unique addition to the fields of Shakespeare and queenship studies. Winner of the 2020 Royal Studies Journal book prize
Download or read book Shakespearean Adaptation Race and Memory in the New World written by Joyce Green MacDonald and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters’ almost complete absence from Shakespeare’s plays. Despite this physical absence, however, they still play central symbolic roles in articulating definitions of love, beauty, chastity, femininity, and civic and social standing, invoked as the opposite and foil of women who are “fair”. Beginning from this recognition of black women’s simultaneous physical absence and imaginative presence, this book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women’s often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare’s world, and our own. Ranging geographically across North America and the Caribbean, and including film and fiction as well as drama as it discusses remade versions of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World will attract scholars of early modern race studies, gender and performance, and women in Renaissance drama.
Download or read book A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles written by Bradley and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 826 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Dictionary of American Proverbs written by Wolfgang Mieder and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 1348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have a gift for coining proverbs. "A picture is worth a thousand words" was not, as you might imagine, the product of ancient Chinese wisdom -- it was actually minted by advertising executive Fred Barnard in a 1921 advertisement for Printer's Ink magazine. After all, Americans are first and foremost a practical people and proverbs can be loosely defined as pithy statements that are generally accepted as true and useful. The next logical step would be to gather all of this wisdom together for a truly American celebration of shrewd advice.A Dictionary of American Proverbs is the first major collection of proverbs in the English language based on oral sources rather than written ones. Listed alphabetically according to their most significant key word, it features over 15,000 entries including uniquely American proverbs that have never before been recorded, as well as thousands of traditional proverbs that have found their way into American speech from classical, biblical, British, continental European, and American literature. Based on the fieldwork conducted over thirty years by the American Dialect Society, this volume is complete with historical references to the earliest written sources, and supplies variants and recorded geographical distribution after each proverb.Many surprised await the reader in this vast treasure trove of wit and wisdom. Collected here are nuggets of popular wisdom on all aspects of American life: weather, agriculture, travel, money, business, food, neighbors, friends, manners, government, politics, law, health, education, religion, music, song, and dance. And, to further enhance browsing pleasure, the editors have provided a detailed guide to the use of the work. While it's true that many of our best known proverbs have been supplied by the ever-present "Anonymous," many more can be attributed to some very famous Americans, like Ernest Hemingway, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas Alva Edison, Abigail Adams, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name but a few offered in this fascinating collection.Who wouldn't want to know the origin of "the opera ain't over till the fat lady sings?" This uniquely American proverb and many more are gathered together in A Dictionary of American Proverbs. A great resource for students and scholars of literature, psychology, folklore, linguistics, anthropology, and cultural history, this endlessly intriguing volume is also a delightful companion for anyone with an interest in American culture.
Download or read book Gender Speech and Audience Reception in Early Modern England written by Kathleen Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes a significant contribution to recent scholarship on the ways in which women responded to the regulation of their behavior by focusing on representations of women speakers and their audiences in moments Smith identifies as "scenes of speech." This new approach, examining speech exchanges between a speaker and audience in which both anticipate, interact with, and respond to each other and each other's expectations, demonstrates that the prescriptive process involves a dynamic exchange in which each side plays a role in establishing and contesting the boundaries of acceptable speech for women. Drawing from a wide range of evidence, including pamphlets, diaries, illustrations, and plays, the book interprets the various and at times contradictory representations and reception of women’s speech that circulated in early modern England. Speech scenes examined within include wives' speech to their husbands in private, private speech between women, public speech before death, and the speech of witches. Looking at scenes of women’s speech from male and female authors, Smith argues that these early modern texts illustrate a means through which societal regulations were negotiated and modified. This book will appeal to those with an interest in early modern drama, including the playwrights Shakespeare, Cary, Webster, Fletcher, and Middleton, as well as readers of non-dramatic early modern literary texts. The volume is of particular use for scholars working in the areas of early modern literature and culture, women’s history, gender studies, and performance studies.
Download or read book Some Other Note written by Ross W. Duffin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English comedy from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century abounds in song lyrics, but most of the original tunes were thought to have been lost--until now. By deducing that playwrights borrowed melodies from songs they already knew, Ross W. Duffin has used the existing English repertory of songs, both popular and composed, to reconstruct hundreds of songs from more than a hundred plays and other stage entertainments. Thanks to Duffin's incredible breakthrough, these plays have been rendered performable with period music for the first time in five hundred years. Some Other Note not only brings these songs back from the dead, but tells a thrilling tale of the investigations that unraveled these centuries-old mysteries.
Download or read book Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies written by Ania Loomba and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s Collaborative Book Prize 2017 Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies is a volume of essays by leading scholars in the field of early modern studies on the history, present state, and future possibilities of feminist criticism and theory. It responds to current anxieties that feminist criticism is in a state of decline by attending to debates and differences that have emerged in light of ongoing scholarly discussions of race, affect, sexuality, and transnationalism-work that compels us continually to reassess our definitions of ’women’ and gender. Rethinking Feminism demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a reimagination of feminist aims, methods, and objects of study at this historical juncture. While the scholars contributing to Rethinking Feminism have very different interests and methods, they are united in their conviction that early modern studies must be in dialogue with, and indeed contribute to, larger theoretical and political debates about gender, race, and sexuality, and to the relationship between these areas. To this end, the essays not only analyze literary texts and cultural practices to shed light on early modern ideology and politics, but also address metacritical questions of methodology and theory. Taken together, they show how a consciousness of the complexity of the past allows us to rethink the genealogies and historical stakes of current scholarly norms and debates.
Download or read book Virtuous Necessity written by Jessica Murphy and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many scholars find the early modern triad of virtues for women—silence, chastity, and obedience—to be straightforward and nonnegotiable, Jessica C. Murphy demonstrates that these virtues were by no means as direct and inflexible as they might seem. Drawing on the literature of the period—from the plays of Shakespeare to a conduct manual written for a princess to letters from a wife to her husband—as well as contemporary gender theory and philosophy, she uncovers the multiple meanings of behavioral expectations for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women. Through her renegotiation of cultural ideals as presented in both literary and nonliterary texts of early modern England, Murphy presents models for “acceptable” women’s conduct that lie outside of the rigid prescriptions of the time. Virtuous Necessity will appeal to readers interested in early modern English literature, including canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, as well as their female contemporaries such as Amelia Lanyer and Elizabeth Cary. It will also appeal to scholars of conduct literature; of early modern drama, popular literature, poetry, and prose; of women’s history; and of gender theory.
Download or read book The Patient Griselda Myth written by Madeline Rüegg and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 14th until the 19th century the last novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron, also known as the Griselda story, has been translated and adapted countless times in many European languages. This story’s success can be explained by considering it a myth and analysing how this myth engages with contemporary discourses, such as the definition of the ideal wife, the querelle des femmes, the socio-political consequences of social exogamy, and tyranny.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Folktale Sources written by Charlotte Artese and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources argues that seven plays—The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline—derive one or more of their plots directly from folktales. In most cases, scholars have accepted one literary version of the folktale as a source. Recognizing that the same story has circulated orally and occurs in other medieval and early modern written versions allows for new readings of the plays. By acknowledging that a play’s source story circulated in multiple forms, we can see how the playwright was engaging his audience on common ground, retelling a story that may have been familiar to many of them, even the illiterate. We can also view the folktale play as a Shakespearean genre, defined by source as the chronicle histories are, that spans and traces the course of Shakespeare’s career. The fact that Shakespeare reworked folktales so frequently also changes the way we see the history of the literary folk- or fairy-tale, which is usually thought to bypass England and move from Italian novella collections to eighteenth-century French salons. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography listing versions of each folktale source as a resource for further research and teaching. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Download or read book A Companion to Shakespeare s Works Volume III written by Richard Dutton and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare’s comedies contains original essays on every comedy from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Twelfth Night as well as twelve additional articles on such topics as the humoral body in Shakespearean comedy, Shakespeare’s comedies on film, Shakespeare’s relation to other comic writers of his time, Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies, and the geographies of Shakespearean comedy.
Download or read book How Shakespeare Became Colonial written by Leah S. Marcus and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Marcus argues that the colonial context in which Shakespeare was edited and disseminated during the heyday of British empire has left a mark on Shakespeare’s texts to the present day. Marcus traces important ways in which the colonial enterprise of setting forth the best possible Shakespeare for world consumption has continued to be visible in the recent treatment of Shakespeare’s texts today, despite our belief that we are global or post-colonial in approach.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Domestic Tragedies written by Emma Whipday and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reassess the relationship between Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and the emerging genre of domestic tragedy by other early modern playwrights.
