Courtships, Marriage Customs, and Shakespeare's Comedies

Courtships, Marriage Customs, and Shakespeare's Comedies PDF Author: L. Giese
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137095164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
Loreen L. Giese's study of over 5000 important folios of court depositions contemporary with Shakespeare's plays demonstrates the complex ways those plays participate in and comment upon their culture, rather than stand apart from it. Both the court records and the plays present women as agents who are capable of challenging their traditional roles.

Courtships, Marriage Customs, and Shakespeare's Comedies

Courtships, Marriage Customs, and Shakespeare's Comedies PDF Author: L. Giese
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137095164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
Loreen L. Giese's study of over 5000 important folios of court depositions contemporary with Shakespeare's plays demonstrates the complex ways those plays participate in and comment upon their culture, rather than stand apart from it. Both the court records and the plays present women as agents who are capable of challenging their traditional roles.

Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays

Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays PDF Author: Cristina León Alfar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134773382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare’s work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men’s accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men’s superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women’s bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women’s agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare’s cuckoldry plays, women’s rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to “shift it” as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.

Shakespeare and Domestic Life

Shakespeare and Domestic Life PDF Author: Sandra Clark
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472581814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dictionary explores the language of domestic life found in Shakespeare's work and seeks to demonstrate the meanings he attaches to it through his uses of it in particular contexts. "Domestic life" covers a range of topics: the language of the household, clothing, food, family relationships and duties; household practices, the architecture of the home, and all that conditions and governs the life of the home. The dictionary draws on recent cultural materialist research to provide in-depth definitions of the domestic language and life in Shakespeare's works, creating a richly rewarding and informative reference tool for upper level students and scholars.

The Game of Love in Georgian England

The Game of Love in Georgian England PDF Author: Sally Holloway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019882307X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and a perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This volume brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic customs over the Georgian era - most notably with the arrival of the printed valentine's card - revealing how love developed into a commercial industry. The book concludes with the rituals of disintegration when engagements went awry, and pursuit of damages for breach of promise in the civil courts. The Game of Love in Georgian England brings together love letters, diaries, valentines, and proposals of marriage from sixty courtships sourced from thirty archives and museum collections, alongside an extensive range of sources including ballads, conduct literature, court cases, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, periodicals, philosophical discourses, plays, poems, and prints, to create a vivid social and cultural history of romantic emotions. The book demonstrates the importance of courtship to studies of marriage, relationships, and emotions in history, and how we write histories of emotions using objects. Love emerges as something that we do in practice, enacted by couples through particular socially and historically determined rituals.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare PDF Author: R. Malcolm Smuts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191074179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 946

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on the period of Shakespeare's career that will assist and stimulate scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than merely attempting to summarize the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, individual chapters seek to exemplify a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies currently used in historical research on the early modern period that can inform close analysis of literature. Different sections examine political history at both the national and local levels; relationships between intellectual culture and the early modern political imagination; relevant aspects of religious and social history; and facets of the histories of architecture, the visual arts, and music. Topics treated include the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere' and its relationship to drama during Shakespeare's lifetime; the role of historical narratives in shaping the period's views on the workings of politics; attitudes about the role of emotion in social life; cultures of honour and shame and the rituals and literary forms through which they found expression; crime and murder; and visual expressions of ideas of moral disorder and natural monstrosity, in printed images as well as garden architecture.

True Relations

True Relations PDF Author: Frances E. Dolan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812244850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examining seventeenth-century crises of evidence and genres of evidence on which both literary critics and historians now depend, True Relations explores the notion that we apprehend truth through other people's relations of it and that those relations, and our own relation to them, are a function of social relationships in conflict.

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace

Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace PDF Author: Kristin M.S. Bezio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000487695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace explores the complex intersection between the geographic, material, and ideological marketplaces through the lens of religious belief and practice. By examining the religiously motivated markets and marketplace practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, Scotland, and Wales, the volume presents religious praxis as a driving force in the formulation and everyday workings of the social and economic markets. Within the volume, the authors address first spiritual markets and marketplaces, discussing the intersection of Puritan and Protestant Ethics with the market economy. The second part addresses material marketplaces, including the marriage market, commercial trade markets, and the post-Reformation Catholic black market. In the third part of the volume, the chapters focus specifically on publication markets and books, including manuscripts and commonplace books, as well as printed volumes and pamphlets. Finally, the volume concludes with an examination of the literary marketplace, with analyses of plays and poems which engage with and depict both spiritual and material markets. Taken as a whole, this collection posits that the "modern" conception of a division between religion and the socioeconomic marketplace was a largely fictional construct, and the chapters demonstrate the depth to which both were integrated in early modern life.

Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599–1639

Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599–1639 PDF Author: Richard Rowland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351879162
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this major reassessment of his subject, Richard Rowland restores Thomas Heywood-playwright, miscellanist and translator-to his rightful place in early modern theatre history. Rowland contextualizes and historicizes this important contemporary of Shakespeare, locating him on the geographic and cultural map of London through the business Heywood conducts in his writing. Arguing that Heywood's theatrical output deserves the same attention and study that has been directed towards Shakespeare, Jonson, and more recently Middleton, this book looks at three periods of Heywood's creativity: the end of the Elizabethan era and the beginning of the Jacobean, the mid 1620s, and the mid to late 1630s. By locating the works of those years precisely in the political and cultural conflicts to which they respond, Rowland initiates a major reassessment of the remarkable achievements of this playwright. Rowland also pays attention to Heywood in performance, seeing this writer as a jobbing playwright working in an industry that depended on making writing work. Finally, the author explores how Heywood participated in the civic life of London in his writings beyond the playhouse. Here Rowland examines pamphlets, translations, and the sequence of lord mayor's pageants that Heywood produced as the political crisis deepened. Offering close readings of Heywood that establish the range, quality and theatrical significance of the writing, Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599-1639 fits a fascinating piece into the emerging picture of the 'complete' early modern English theatre.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy PDF Author: Alexander Leggatt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521779425
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.

The Routledge History of Sex and the Body

The Routledge History of Sex and the Body PDF Author: Sarah Toulalan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136744282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Routledge History of Sex and the Body provides an overview of the main themes surrounding the history of sexuality from 1500 to the present day. The history of sex and the body is an expanding field in which vibrant debate on, for instance, the history of homosexuality, is developing. This book examines the current scholarship and looks towards future directions across the field. The volume is divided into fourteen thematic chapters, which are split into two chronological sections 1500 – 1750 and 1750 to present day. Focusing on the history of sexuality and the body in the West but also interactions with a broader globe, these thematic chapters survey the major areas of debate and discussion. Covering themes such as science, identity, the gaze, courtship, reproduction, sexual violence and the importance of race, the volume offers a comprehensive view of the history of sex and the body. The book concludes with an afterword in which the reader is invited to consider some of the ‘tensions, problems and areas deserving further scrutiny’. Including contributors renowned in their field of expertise, this ground-breaking collection is essential reading for all those interested in the history of sexuality and the body.