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 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 Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England written by Walter S H Lim and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare’s literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare’s deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare’s engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.
Download or read book Religion and Drama in Early Modern England written by Elizabeth Williamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.
Download or read book The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama written by Elizabeth Williamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama is the first book to present a detailed examination of early modern theatrical properties informed by the complexity of post-Reformation religious practice. Although English Protestant reformers set out to destroy all vestiges of Catholic idolatry, public theater companies frequently used stage properties to draw attention to the remnants of traditional religion as well as the persistent materiality of post-Reformation worship. The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama explores the relationship between popular culture and theatrical performance by considering the social history and dramatic function of these properties, addressing their role as objects of devotion, idolatry, and remembrance on the professional stage. Rather than being aligned with identifiably Catholic or Protestant values, the author reveals how religious stage properties functioned as fulcrums around which more subtle debates about the status of Christian worship played out. Given the relative lack of existing documentation on stage properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama employs a wide range of source materials-including inventories published in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes-to account for the material presence of these objects on the public stage. By combining historical research on popular religion with detailed readings of the scripts themselves, the book fills a gap in our knowledge about the physical qualities of the stage properties used in early modern productions. Tracing the theater's appropriation of highly charged religious properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama provides a new framework for understanding the canonization of early modern plays, especially those of Shakespeare.
Download or read book Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama written by Lieke Stelling and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few subjects of the English stage have proved more alluring and enduring than religious conversion. The emergence of the Elizabethan theatre marked a profound shift in the way in which conversion was presented. If medieval drama had encouraged conversion without reservation, early Elizabethan plays started to question it. Considering over forty canonical and lesser known works, this study argues that more so than any other medium, early modern drama engaged with the question of the possibility of undergoing a radical transformation in faith and presented the period's understanding of it as fundamentally unsettled. Offering the first cross-religious exploration of conversion in early modern English drama, and presenting a new reading of William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, Lieke Stelling reveals telling patterns in the stage's treatment of conversion and religious identity.
Download or read book Religion and Culture in Renaissance England written by Claire McEachern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays by leading historians and literary scholars investigate the role of religion in shaping political, social and literary forms, and their reciprocal role in shaping early modern religion, from the Reformation to the Civil Wars. Reflecting and rethinking the insights of new historicism and cultural studies, individual essays take up various aspects of the productive, if tense, relation between Tudor-Stuart Christianity and culture, and explore how religion informs some of the central texts of English Renaissance literature: the vernacular Bible, Foxe's Acts and Monuments, Hooker's Laws, Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, the poems of John Donne, Amelia Lanyer and John Milton. The collection demonstrates the centrality of religion to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and its influence on early modern constructions of gender, subjectivity and nationhood.
Download or read book A Will to Believe written by David Scott Kastan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 19 December 1601, John Croke, then Speaker of the House of Commons, addressed his colleagues: "If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion." But if religion was recognized as the "chief thing in a Commonwealth," we have been less certain what it does in Shakespeare's plays. Written and performed in a culture in which religion was indeed inescapable, the plays have usually been seen either as evidence of Shakespeare's own disinterested secularism or, more recently, as coded signposts to his own sectarian commitments. Based upon the inaugural series of the Oxford-Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2008, A Will to Believe offers a thoughtful, surprising, and often moving consideration of how religion actually functions in them: not as keys to Shakespeare's own faith but as remarkably sensitive registers of the various ways in which religion charged the world in which he lived. The book shows what we know and can't know about Shakespeare's own beliefs, and demonstrates, in a series of wonderfully alert and agile readings, how the often fraught and vertiginous religious environment of Post-Reformation England gets refracted by the lens of Shakespeare's imagination.
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 The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Religion written by Alison Shell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sets Shakespeare in the religious context of his times, presenting a balanced, up-to-date account of current biographical and critical debates, and addressing the fascinating, under-studied topic of how Shakespeare's writing was perceived by literary contemporaries - both Catholic and Protestant - whose priorities were more obviously religious than his own. It advances new readings of several plays, especially Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale; these draw in many cases on new and under-exploited contemporary analogues, ranging from conversion narratives, books of devotion and polemical pamphlets to manuscript drama and emblems. Shakespeare's writing has been seen both as profoundly religious, giving everyday human life a sacramental quality, and as profoundly secular, foreshadowing the kind of humanism that sees no necessity for God. This study attempts to reconcile these two points of view, describing a writer whose language is saturated in religious discourse and whose dramaturgy is highly attentive to religious precedent, but whose invariable practice is to subordinate religious matter to the particular aesthetic demands of the work in hand. For Shakespeare, as for few of his contemporaries, the Judaeo-Christian story is something less than a master narrative.
Download or read book Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England written by David K. Anderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Webster and John Milton, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England argues that the English tragedians reflected an unease within the culture to acts of religious violence. David Anderson explores a link between the unstable emotional response of society to religious executions in the Tudor-Stuart period, and the revival of tragic drama as a major cultural form for the first time since classical antiquity. Placing John Foxe at the center of his historical argument, Anderson argues that Foxe’s Book of Martyrs exerted a profound effect on the social conscience of English Protestantism in his own time and for the next century. While scholars have in recent years discussed the impact of Foxe and the martyrs on the period’s literature, this book is the first to examine how these most vivid symbols of Reformation-era violence influenced the makers of tragedy. As the persecuting and the persecuted churches collided over the martyr’s body, Anderson posits, stress fractures ran through the culture and into the playhouse; in their depictions of violence, the early modern tragedians focused on the ethical confrontation between collective power and the individual sufferer. Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England sheds new light on the particular emotional energy of Tudor-Stuart tragedy, and helps explain why the genre reemerged at this time.
Download or read book The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England written by Mark Fortier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth and James, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Bacon and Ellesmere, Perkins and Laud, Milton and Hobbes-this begins a list of early modern luminaries who write on 'equity'. In this study Mark Fortier addresses the concept of equity from early in the sixteenth century until 1660, drawing on the work of lawyers, jurists, politicians, kings and parliamentarians, theologians and divines, poets, dramatists, colonists and imperialists, radicals, royalists, and those who argue on gender issues. He examines how writers in all these groups make use of the word equity and its attendant notions. Equity, he argues, is a powerful concept in the period; he analyses how notions of equity play a prominent part in discourses that have or seek to have influence on major social conflicts and issues in early modern England. Fortier here maps the actual and extensive presence of equity in the intellectual life of early modern England. In so doing, he reveals how equity itself acts as an umbrella term for a wide array of ideas, which defeats any attempt to limit narrowly the meaning of the term. He argues instead that there is in early modern England a distinct and striking culture of equity characterized and strengthened by the diversity of its genealogy and its applications. This culture manifests itself, inter alia, in the following major ways: as a basic component, grounded in the old and new testaments, of a model for Christian society; as the justification for a justice system over and above the common law; as an imperative for royal prerogative; as a free ranging subject for poetry and drama; as a nascent grounding for broadly cast social justice; as a rallying cry for revolution and individual rights and freedoms. Working from an empirical account of the many meanings of equity over time, the author moves from a historical understanding of equity to a theorization of equity in its multiplicity. A profoundly literary study, this book also touches on matters of legal an
Download or read book Shakespeare and Religious Change written by K. Graham and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-16 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This balanced and innovative collection explores the relationship of Shakespeare's plays to the changing face of early modern religion, considering the connections between Shakespeare's theatre and the religious past, the religious identities of the present and the deep cultural changes that would shape the future of religion in the modern world.
Download or read book Religion Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain written by Patrick Collinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventeen distinguished historians of early modern Britain pay tribute to an outstanding scholar and teacher, presenting reviews of major areas of debate.
Download or read book Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts written by Arthur F. Marotti and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions, editors Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt present thirteen essays that examine the complex religious culture of early modern England. Emphasizing particularly the marginalized discourses of Catholicism and Judaism in mainstream English Protestant culture, the authors highlight the instability of an official religious order that was troubled not only by religious heterodoxy but also by feminist and secular challenges. North American and Israeli scholars present essays on a wide range of subjects all assumed to be "marginal" but which in a real sense were central to the religious and cultural life of the Protestant English nation. Using critical methods ranging from historical analysis, deconstruction, feminist inquiry, and intertextual interpretation to pedagogical experimentation, contributors offer analyses in five sections: Minority Catholic Culture, Figuring the Jew, Hebraism and the Bible, Women and Religion, and Religion and Secularization. Essays reveal new aspects of familiar texts such as Shakespeare's King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, the psalm translations by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, Christopher Marlowe's dramas, George Herbert's poetry, Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, and John Milton's Samson Agonistes. They also call attention to works such as the mid-sixteenth-century play The Historie of Jacob and Esau, William Blundell's Catholic antiquarian writing, the series of paintings portraying the religious institute of Mary Ward, and funeral sermons for religiously active women. Contributors show that we cannot understand a culture without attending to its repressed, marginalized, and unacknowledged elements. Scholars of religious, literary, and cultural history will enjoy this illuminating collection.
Download or read book Performance and Religion in Early Modern England written by Matthew J. Smith and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture. Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures. Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.
