Download or read book Language and Politics in the Sixteenth Century History Play written by D. Cavanagh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-12-12 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play examines a key preoccupation of historical drama in the period 1538-1600: the threat presented by uncivil language. 'Unlicensed' speech informs the presentation of political debate in Tudor history plays and it is also the subject of their most daring political speculations. By analyzing plays by John Bale, Thomas Norton, Thomas Sackville, and Robert Greene, as well as Shakespeare, this study also argues for a more inclusive approach to the genre.
Download or read book Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare s English History Plays written by Hailey Bachrach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hailey Bachrach reframes female characters' roles in the history plays, overhauling their critical reputations. Combining literary and theatrical analysis, she illuminates how Shakespeare imagined the past."--
Download or read book Tyranny and Usurpation written by Doyeeta Majumder and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the middle years of the 16th century, English drama witnessed the emergence of the 'tyrant by entrie' or the usurper, who supplanted earlier 'tyrant by the administration' as the main antihero of political drama. This usurper or, in Machiavellian terms principe nuove, was the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own 'virtue' and through an act of 'lawmaking' violence. Early Tudor morality plays were exclusively concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant; in the political drama of the first half of the 16th century, we do not encounter a single instance of usurpation among the texts that are still available to us. Devoted exclusively to the study of usurpation and tyranny in 16th-century drama and politics, this book will challenge existing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these critical questions.
Download or read book Unperfect Histories written by Harriet Archer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-20 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems in the voices of medieval rulers and rebels compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset, and Richard Niccols between 1574 and 1610 extended the Mirror's scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the texts' later manifestations profoundly influenced the work of Spenser and Shakespeare. Unperfect Histories is the first monograph to consider the text's early modern transmission history as a whole. In chapters on Baldwin, Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's complaint collections, it demonstrates that the Mirror is an invaluable witness to how verse history was conceptualized, written, and read across the period, and explores the ways in which it was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in response to changing contemporary concerns. The Mirror corpus encompasses topical allegory, nationalist polemic, and historiographical skepticism, as well as the macabre humour and metatextual play which have come to be known as hallmarks of Baldwin's mid-Tudor writings. What has not been recognised is the complex interaction of these themes and techniques right across the Mirror's history. Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's contributions are analysed for the first time here, both within their own literary and historiographical contexts, and in dialogue with Baldwin's early editions. This new reading offers a lively account of the texts' depth and variety, and provides insight into the extent of the Mirror's influence and ubiquity in early modern literary culture.
Download or read book Lawyers at Play written by Jessica Winston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. But how did the Inns come to be literary centers in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, the period when a large literary network first developed around the societies, this study demonstrates that the literary surge at this time developed out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Poetry, translation, and performance were recreational pastimes; however, these activities also defined and elevated the status of inns-of-court men as qualified, learned, and ethical participants in England's "legal magistracy": those lawyers, judges, justices of the peace, civic office holders, town recorders, and gentleman landholders who managed and administered local and national governance of England. Lawyers at Play maps the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance, but it also provides the foundation for an argument that goes beyond the 1560s to provide a framework for understanding the connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the whole of the early modern period." -- Book jacket.
Download or read book Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England written by S. P. Cerasano and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2006-10 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published annually. Each volume contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres as well as substantial reviews of books and essays dealing with medieval and early modern English drama before 1642. Volume 19 reflects a variety of scholarly interests. The collection opens with two essays - each exploring different aspects of John Webster and James Shirley - that further our understanding of attribution studies. One essay - on the ownership of the Bell Savage Playhouse - showcases MaRDiE's ongoing interest in early playhouses, while another - on Marston's Entertainment at Ashby - addresses performance history. Two further essays discuss issues related to stage costuming. Issues of actual identity are raised in an essay concerning John Lyly's biography, while two other authors probe the complex connections between drama and economics. William Rowley's All Lost by Lust becomes the centerpiece for a reassessment of rape tragedy. S. P. Cerasano is the Edgar W. B. Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University.
Download or read book English Historical Drama 1500 1660 written by Barbara Ravelhofer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-12-04 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, exploring both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order discuss a wide variety of possible sources for historical drama, ranging from oral traditions to chronicles. They also explore genres outside the canon which think of 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities and closet drama.
Download or read book Subjects of Advice written by Ivan Lupić and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Subjects of Advice, Ivan Lupić uncovers the rich interconnectedness of dramatic art and the culture of counsel in the early modern period. While counsel was an important form of practical knowledge, with concrete political consequences, it was also an ingrained cultural habit, a feature of obligatory mental, moral, and political hygiene. To be a Renaissance subject, Lupić claims, one had to reckon with the advice of others. Lupić examines this reckoning in a variety of sixteenth-century dramatic contexts. The result is an original account of the foundational role that counsel played in the development of Renaissance drama. Lupić begins by considering the figure of Thomas More, whose influential argument about counsel as a form of performance in Utopia set the agenda for the entire century. Resisting linear narratives and recovering, instead, the simultaneity of radically different kinds of dramatic experience, he shows the vitality of later dramatic engagements with More's legacy through an analysis of the moral interlude staged within Sir Thomas More, a play possibly coauthored by Shakespeare. More also helps explain the complex use of counsel in Senecan drama, from the neo-Latin plays of George Buchanan, discussed in connection with Buchanan's political writings, to the historical tragedies of the mid-sixteenth century. If tyranny and exemplarity are the keywords for early Elizabethan drama of counsel, for the plays of Christopher Marlowe it is friendship. Lupić considers Marlowe's interest in friendship and counsel, most notably in Edward II, alongside earlier dramatic treatments, thus exposing the pervasive fantasy of the ideal counselor as another self. Subjects of Advice concludes by placing King Lear in relation to its dramatic sources to demonstrate Shakespeare's deliberate dispersal of counsel throughout his play. Counsel's customary link to plain and fearless speech becomes in Shakespeare's hands a powerful instrument of poetic and dramatic expression.
Download or read book Illegitimacy and the National Family in Early Modern England written by Helen Vella Bonavita and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study considers the figure of the bastard in the context of analogies of the family and the state in early modern England. The trope of illegitimacy, more than being simply a narrative or character-driven issue, is a vital component in the evolving construction and representation of British national identity in prose and drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through close reading of a range of plays and prose texts, the book offers readers new insight into the semiotics of bastardy and concepts of national identity in early modern England, and reflects on contemporary issues of citizenship and identity. The author examines play texts of the period including Bale's King Johan, Peele's The Troublesome Reign of John, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and King Lear in the context of a selection of legal, religious, and polemical texts. In so doing, she illuminates the extent to which the figure of the bastard and, more generally the trope of illegitimacy, existed as a distinct discourse within the wider discursive framework of family and nation.
Download or read book This England That Shakespeare written by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Shakespeare English, British, neither or both? Addressing from various angles the relation of the figure of the national poet/dramatist to constructions of England and Englishness this collection of essays probes the complex issues raised by this question, first through explorations of his plays, principally though not exclusively the histories (Part One), then through discussion of a range of subsequent appropriations and reorientations of Shakespeare and 'his' England (Part Two). If Shakespeare has been taken to stand for Britain as well as England, as if the two were interchangeable, this double identity has come under increasing strain with the break-up - or shake-up - of Britain through devolution and the end of Empire. Essays in Part One examine how the fissure between English and British identities is probed in Shakespeare's own work, which straddles a vital juncture when an England newly independent from Rome was negotiating its place as part of an emerging British state and empire. Essays in Part Two then explore the vexed relations of 'Shakespeare' to constructions of authorial identity as well as national, class, gender and ethnic identities. At this crucial historical moment, between the restless interrogations of the tercentenary celebrations of the Union of Scotland and England in 2007 and the quatercentenary celebrations of the death of the bard in 2016, amid an increasing clamour for a separate English parliament, when the end of Britain is being foretold and when flags and feelings are running high, this collection has a topicality that makes it of interest not only to students and scholars of Shakespeare studies and Renaissance literature, but to readers inside and outside the academy interested in the drama of national identities in a time of transition.
Download or read book Of Memory and Literary Form written by Kyle Pivetti and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book opens with a crisis of recollection. In the early modern period, real political traumas like civil war and regicide exacerbated what were already perceived ruptures in myths of English descent. William Camden and other scholars had revealed that the facts of history could not justify the Arthurian myths, nor could history itself guarantee any moment of collective origin for the English people. Yet poets and playwrights concerned with the status of the emerging nation state did not respond with new material evidence. Instead, they turned to the literary structures that—through a range of what the author calls mnemonic effects—could generate the experience of a collective past. As Sir Philip Sidney recognized, verse depends upon the repetitions of rhyme and meter; consequently poetry “far exceedeth prose in the knitting up of memory.” These poetic and linguistic forms expose national memory as a construction at potential odds with history, for memory operates like language—through a series of signifiers that acquire new meaning as one rearranges and rereads them. Moving from the tragedy Gorboduc (1561) to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Pivetti shows how such “knitting up of memory” created the shared pasts that generate nationhood. His work implies that memory emerges not from what actually occurred, but from the forms that compose it. Or to adapt the words of Paul Ricoeur: “we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place.” The same is true even when that “something” is nationhood.
Download or read book Lying in Early Modern English Culture written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Early Modern Age written by Naomi Conn Liebler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period and across geographic, political, and social references. They attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European exempla from Croatia and Hungary. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.
Download or read book King John written by Joseph Candido and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume in Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition increases our knowledge of how Shakespeare's plays were received and understood by critics, editors and general readers. Updated with a new introduction providing a survey of critical responses to the plays since the late 1930s to the present day, the volume offers, in separate sections, both critical opinions about the play across the centuries and an evaluation of their positions within and their impact on the reception of the play. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, whereas the introduction offers a critical evaluation from a current stance, including modern theories and methods. Thus the volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the play and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism surrounding it as they have developed from century to century.
Download or read book Hamlet s Moment written by András Kiséry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Hamlet's Moment' reveals how plays written in the first decade of the 17th century were shaped by forms of professional political knowledge and by the social promises such knowledge held, and they familiarised their audiences with them.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama written by Thomas Betteridge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Drama is the authoritative secondary text on Tudor drama. It both integrates recent important research across different disciplines and periods and sets a new agenda for the future study of Tudor drama, questioning a number of the central assumptions of previous studies. Balancing the interests and concerns of scholars in theatre history, drama, and literary studies, its scope reflects the broad reach of Tudor drama as a subject, inviting readers to see the Tudor century as a whole, rather than made up of artificial and misleading divisions between 'medieval' and 'renaissance', religious and secular, pre- and post-Shakespeare. The contributors, both the established leaders in their fields and the brightest young scholars, attend to the contexts, intellectual, theatrical and historical within which drama was written, produced and staged in this period, and ask us to consider afresh this most vital and complex of periods in theatre history. The book is divided into four sections: Religious Drama; Interludes and Comedies, Entertainments, Masques, and Royal Entries; and Histories and political dramas.
Download or read book Cultural Reformations written by Brian Cummings and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. 'Cultural Reformations' initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.
