Download or read book Religion Around Shakespeare written by Peter Iver Kaufman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Christianity written by E. Beatrice Batson and published by Baylor University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the influences of Catholicism and Protestantism in a trio of Shakespeare's tragedies: Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Bypassing the discussion of Shakespeare's personal religious beliefs, Batson instead focuses on distinct footprints left by Catholic and Protestant traditions that underlie and inform Shakespeare's artistic genius.
Download or read book Catholic Theology in Shakespeare s Plays written by David N. Beauregard and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores and reexamines Shakespeare's theology from the standpoint of revisionist history of the English Reformation.
Download or read book A Will to Believe written by David Scott Kastan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Will to Believe is a revised version of Kastan's 2008 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, providing a provocative account of the ways in which religion animates Shakespeare's plays.
Download or read book Shakespeare on Love written by Joseph Pearce and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having given the evidence for William Shakespeare's Catholicism in two previous books, literary biographer Joseph Pearce turns his attention in this work to the Bard's most famous play, Romeo and Juliet. "Star-crossed" Romeo and Juliet are Shakespeare's most famous lovers and perhaps the most well-known lovers in literary history. Though the young pair has been held up as a romantic ideal, the play is a tragedy, ending in death. What then, asks Pearce, is Shakespeare saying about his protagonists? Are they the hapless victims of fate, or are they partly to blame for their deaths? Is their love the "real thing", or is it self-indulgent passion? And what about the adults in their lives? Did they give the young people the example and guidance that they needed? The Catholic understanding of sexual desire, and its need to be ruled by reason, is on display in Romeo and Juliet, argues Pearce. The play is not a paean to romance but a cautionary tale about the naïveté and folly of youthful infatuation and the disastrous consequences of poor parenting. The well-known characters and their oft-quoted lines are rich in symbolic meaning that points us in the direction of the age-old wisdom of the Church. Although such a reading of Romeo and Juliet is countercultural in an age that glorifies the heedless and headless heart of young love, Pearce makes his case through a meticulous engagement with Shakespeare and his age and with the text of the play itself.
Download or read book The Quest for Shakespeare written by Joseph Pearce and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly regarded and best-selling literary writer and teacher, Joseph Pearce presents a stimulating and vivid biography of the world's most revered writer that is sure to be controversial. Unabashedly provocative, with scholarship, insight and keen observation, Pearce strives to separate historical fact from fiction about the beloved Bard. Shakespeare is not only one of the greatest figures in human history, he is also one of the most controversial and one of the most elusive. He is famous and yet almost unknown. Who was he? What were his beliefs? Can we really understand his plays and his poetry if we don't know the man who wrote them? These are some of the questions that are asked and answered in this gripping and engaging study of the world's greatest ever poet. The Quest for Shakespeare claims that books about the Bard have got him totally wrong. They misread the man and misread the work. The true Shakespeare has eluded the grasp of the critics. Dealing with the facts of Shakespeare's life and times, Pearce's quest leads to the inescapable conclusion that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic living in very anti-Catholic times. Many of his friends and family were persecuted, and even executed, for their Catholic faith. And yet he seems to have avoided any notable persecution himself. How did he do this? How did he respond to the persecution of his friends and family? What did he say about the dreadful and intolerant times in which he found himself? The Quest for Shakespeare answers these questions in ways that will enlighten and astonish those who love Shakespeare's work, and that will shock and outrage many of his critics. This book is full of surprises for beginner and expert alike.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion written by Hannibal Hamlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging yet accessible investigation into the importance of religion in Shakespeare's works, from a team of eminent international scholars.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England written by Dennis Taylor and published by Studies in Religion and Litera. This book was released on 2003 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of Shakespeare's Catholic contexts has occupied many scholars in recent years and this study brings together 16 original essays examining Shakespeare's work in the light of revisionist scholarship, from monastic life in 'Measure for Measure' to Puritanism in 'Hamlet'.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Religious Allusiveness written by Maurice Hunt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness complicates debates about whether Shakespeare's plays are fundamentally Protestant or Catholic in sympathy, challenging analyses that either find Protestant elements consistently undercutting Catholic motifs or, less often, discover evidence of the playwright's endorsement of Catholic doctrine and customs. Rather, Maurice Hunt argues that Shakespeare's syncretistic method of incorporating both Protestant and Catholic elements into his plays was singular among early modern English playwrights at a time when governmental and social tolerance of Protestantism in the theatre was high and criticism of stereotyped Catholicism was correspondingly rampant in drama. In-depth discussions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Second Henriad, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, and Othello reveal how Shakespeare allusively integrates Reformation Protestant and Roman Catholic motifs and systems of thought. This book sheds new light on the playwright's knowledge of and interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean religious debates over the nature of spiritual reformation, the efficacy of merit for redemption, and the operation of Providence. It will appeal not only to Shakespeare scholars but to those interested in the cultural history of the Reformation.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion written by David Loewenstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history.
Download or read book Secret Shakespeare written by Richard Wilson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the last century. No biography of the Bard is now complete without chapters on the paranoia and persecution in which he was educated, or the treason which engulfed his family. Whether to suffer outrageous fortune or take up arms in suicidal resistance was, as Hamlet says, 'the question' that fired Shakespeare's stage. In 'Secret Shakespeare' Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived. Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a 'golden time' of future toleration, 'What's to come' is always unsure. Whether or not 'He died a papist', it is because we can never 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist. This is a fascinating work, which will be essential reading for all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine written by Roland Mushat Frye and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining scholarship with grace, the author shows in this study that Shakespeare's works are pervasively secular, that he was concerned with the dramatization of universally human situations within a temporal and this-worldly arena, and that he was familiar with and used theological materials as only one of many natural and available sources. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Christian Humanism in Shakespeare written by Lee Oser and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian grounds. Stressing Shakespeare’s theological sensitivity, Oser places Shakespeare’s work in the “radical middle,” the dialectical opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of art intended for a catholic (small “c”) audience. It describes the conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his literary purposes. Oser reviews the rival cases for a Protestant Shakespeare and for a Catholic Shakespeare, but leaves the issue open, focusing, instead, on how Shakespeare exploits artistic resources that are specific to Christianity, including the classical-Christian rhetorical tradition. The scope of the book ranges from an introductory survey of the critical field as it now stands, to individual chapters on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, Hamlet, and King Lear. Writing with a deep sense of literary history, Oser holds that mainstream literary criticism has created a false picture of Shakespeare by secularizing him and misconstruing the nature of his art. Through careful study of the plays, Oser recovers a Shakespeare who is less vulnerable to the winds of academic and political fashion, and who is a friend to the enduring project of humanistic education. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare: A Study in Religion and Literature is both eminently readable and a work of consequence.
Download or read book Hamlet s Choice written by Peter Lake and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating account of how Shakespeare worked through the tensions of Queen Elizabeth's England in two canon-defining plays Conspiracies and revolts simmered beneath the surface of Queen Elizabeth's reign. England was riven with tensions created by religious conflict and the prospect of dynastic crisis and regime change. In this rich, incisive account, Peter Lake reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, Lake argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.
Download or read book Texts and Traditions written by Beatrice Groves and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2006-11-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texts and Traditions explores Shakespeare's thoroughgoing engagement with the religious culture of his time. In the wake of the recent resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's Catholicism, Groves eschews a reductively biographical approach and considers instead the ways in which Shakespeare's borrowing from both the visual culture of Catholicism and the linguistic wealth of the Protestant English Bible enriched his drama. Through close readings of a number of plays - Romeo and Juliet, King John, 1 Henry IV, Henry V ,and Measure for Measure - Groves unearths and explains previously unrecognised allusions to the Bible, the Church's liturgy, and to the mystery plays performed in England in Shakespeare's boyhood. Texts and Traditions provides new evidence of the way in which Shakespeare exploited his audience's cultural memory and biblical knowledge in order to enrich his ostensibly secular drama and argues that we need to unravel the interpretative possibilities of these religious nuances in order fully to grasp the implications of his plays.
Download or read book Shakespeare the Papist written by Peter Milward and published by Sapientia Classics. This book was released on 2005 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sapientia Classics Series Shakespeare, who wrote at the beginning of the long period in which the Catholic faith as violently suppressed in the British Isles, has long enjoyed an iconic status. Some readers have interpreted him as an early agnostic, expressing modern angst about whether anything exists besides "this mortal coil" that seems to be merely "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." In recent years, however, thanks largely to the work of Peter Milward, close study of Shakespeare's plays has raised the question: Was Shakespeare in fact a believing Catholic? To this question, which radically changes the way that Shakespeare's plays should be read, Milward here offers, in his definitive study of the topic, a resounding "Yes."
Download or read book The Faith of William Shakespeare written by Graham Holderness and published by Lion Books. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Shakespeare stills stands head and shoulders above any other author in the English language, a position that is unlikely ever to change. Yet it is often said that we know very little about him - and that applies as much to what he believed as it does to the rest of his biography. Or does it? In this authoritative new study, Graham Holderness takes us through the context of Shakespeare's life, times of religious and political turmoil, and looks at what we do know of Shakespeare the Anglican. But then he goes beyond that, and mines the plays themselves, not just for the words of the characters, but for the concepts, themes and language which Shakespeare was himself steeped in - the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Considering particularly such plays as Richard ll, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, Holderness shows how the ideas of Catholicism come up against those of Luther and Calvin; how Christianity was woven deep into Shakespeare's psyche, and how he brought it again and again to his art.
