Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama

Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama PDF Author: Lloyd Edward Kermode
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521899532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Examines a variety of plays between 1550-1600 to demonstrate how they asserted ideas and ideals of 'Englishness' for audiences.

Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama

Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama PDF Author: Lloyd Edward Kermode
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521899532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Examines a variety of plays between 1550-1600 to demonstrate how they asserted ideas and ideals of 'Englishness' for audiences.

Doppelganger Dilemmas

Doppelganger Dilemmas PDF Author: Marjorie Rubright
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812246233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The Dutch were culturally ubiquitous in England during the early modern period and constituted London's largest alien population in the second half of the sixteenth century. While many sought temporary refuge from Spanish oppression in the Low Countries, others became part of a Dutch diaspora, developing their commercial, spiritual, and domestic lives in England. The category "Dutch" catalyzed questions about English self-definition that were engendered less by large-scale cultural distinctions than by uncanny similarities. Doppelgänger Dilemmas uncovers the ways England's real and imagined proximities with the Dutch played a crucial role in the making of English ethnicity. Marjorie Rubright explores the tensions of Anglo-Dutch relations that emerged in the form of puns, double entendres, cognates, homophones, copies, palimpsests, doppelgängers, and other doublings of character and kind. Through readings of London's stage plays and civic pageantry, English and Continental polyglot and bilingual dictionaries and grammars, and travel accounts of Anglo-Dutch rivalries and friendships in the Spice Islands, Rubright reveals how representations of Dutchness played a vital role in shaping Englishness in virtually every aspect of early modern social life. Her innovative book sheds new light on the literary and historical forces of similitude in an era that was so often preoccupied with ethnic and cultural difference.

Labors Lost

Labors Lost PDF Author: Natasha Korda
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220431X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities. Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays, Labors Lost retrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of women's work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Shakespeare and Immigration

Shakespeare and Immigration PDF Author: Ruben Espinosa
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317056612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Shakespeare and Immigration critically examines the vital role of immigrants and aliens in Shakespeare's drama and culture. On the one hand, the essays in this collection interrogate how the massive influx of immigrants during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I influenced perceptions of English identity and gave rise to anxieties about homeland security in early modern England. On the other, they shed light on how our current concerns surrounding immigration shape our perception of the role of the alien in Shakespeare's work and expand the texts in new and relevant directions for a contemporary audience. The essays consider the immigrant experience; strangers and strangeness; values of hospitality in relationship to the foreigner; the idea of a host society; religious refuge and refugees; legal views of inclusion and exclusion; structures of xenophobia; and early modern homeland security. In doing so, this volume offers a variety of perspectives on the immigrant experience in Shakespearean drama and how the influential nature of the foreigner affects perceptions of community and identity; and, collection questions what is at stake in staging the anxieties and opportunities associated with foreigners. Ultimately, Shakespeare and Immigration offers the first sustained study of the significance of the immigrant and alien experience to our understanding of Shakespeare's work. By presenting a compilation of views that address Shakespeare's attention to the role of the foreigner, the volume constitutes a timely and relevant addition to studies of race, ethics, and identity in Shakespeare.

Alien Albion

Alien Albion PDF Author: Scott Oldenburg
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442667508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Using both canonical and underappreciated texts, Alien Albion argues that early modern England was far less unified and xenophobic than literary critics have previously suggested. Juxtaposing literary texts from the period with legal, religious, and economic documents, Scott Oldenburg uncovers how immigrants to England forged ties with their English hosts and how those relationships were reflected in literature that imagined inclusive, multicultural communities. Through discussions of civic pageantry, the plays of dramatists including William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton, the poetry of Anne Dowriche, and the prose of Thomas Deloney, Alien Albion challenges assumptions about the origins of English national identity and the importance of religious, class, and local identities in the early modern era.

Macbeth Before Shakespeare

Macbeth Before Shakespeare PDF Author: Benjamin Hudson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197567533
Category : Kings and rulers in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"Macbeth before Shakespeare is the history of a man and a myth. The man is the historical King Mac bethad while the myth is his literary descendant Macbeth. During the five and a half centuries before William Shakespeare wrote his Tragedie of Macbeth the man was replaced by the myth that was recreated in the hands of successive authors. The real prince's ancestors had been immigrants to Britain from Ireland and Mac bethad's career began after the murder of his father by his cousins. The literary character was created as the family of his rival Malcolm Canmore became supreme and wrote their own history with Macbeth as their villain. The evolution continued and in the fifteenth century he was accompanied by otherworldly beings, diabolical prophecies, and natural phenomenon. Macbeth was recast early in the sixteenth century and took his place in the intellectual warfare of Scotland. The legend moved to England in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles where a new Macbeth had a complex personality with fashionable interests in law and unfashionable ones in the occult. The succession of King James I of England led English acting companies, such as the Lord Chamberlain's Men with actor and playwright William Shakespeare, to produce plays with Scottish scenes or characters. King James became their patron and as a member of the King's Men, Shakespeare wrote his Tragedie of Macbeth, one of their most popular plays from the seventeenth century to the present"--

Shakespeare and Conflict

Shakespeare and Conflict PDF Author: C. Dente
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137311347
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
What has been the role played by principles, patterns and situations of conflict in the construction of Shakespeare's myth, and in its European and then global spread? The fascinatingly complex picture that emerges from this collection provides new insight into Shakespeare's unique position in world literature and culture.

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Natasha Korda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134783043
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.

Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries PDF Author: Dirk Delabastita
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027268371
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
No literary tradition in early modern Europe was as obsessed with the interaction between the native tongue and its dialectal variants, or with ‘foreign’ languages and the phenomenon of ‘translation’, as English Renaissance drama. Originally published as a themed issue of English Text Construction 6:1 (2013), this carefully balanced collection of essays, now enhanced with a new Afterword, decisively demonstrates that Shakespeare and his colleagues were far more than just ‘English’ authors and that their very ‘Englishness’ can only be properly understood in a broader international and multilingual context. Showing a healthy disrespect for customary disciplinary borderlines, Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries brings together a wide range of scholarly traditions and vastly different types of expertise. While several papers venture into previously uncharted territory, others critically revisit some of the loci classici of early modern theatrical multilingualism such as Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England

Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England PDF Author: Rory Loughnane
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030008924
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book looks at the staging and performance of normality in early modern drama. Analysing conventions and rules, habitual practices, common things and objects, and mundane sights and experiences, this volume foregrounds a staged normality that has been heretofore unseen, ignored, or taken for granted. It draws together leading and emerging scholars of early modern theatre and culture to debate the meaning of normality in an early modern context and to discuss how it might transfer to the stage. In doing so, these original critical essays unsettle and challenge scholarly assumptions about how normality is represented in the performance space. The volume, which responds to studies of the everyday and the material turn in cultural history, as well as to broader philosophical engagements with the idea of normality and its opposites, brings to light the essential role that normality plays in the composition and performance of early modern drama. This book was preceded by a companion collection, Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England, published in 2013: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137349354