Eros and Power in English Renaissance Drama

Eros and Power in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786431652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 557

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Book Description
This book features five plays from the English Renaissance that explore political questions and developments by telling stories about the erotic impulses of a ruler. The volume contains fully annotated and modernized versions of Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Massinger's The Duke of Milan, Davenant's The Cruel Brother, and Ford's Love's Sacrifice. The editor provides an introduction, initial discussion, and selected illustration(s) for each play, along with an introduction to erotic politics and the Renaissance-era political mentality. A bibliography includes suggestions for further reading and a list of useful websites for students.

Eros and Power in English Renaissance Drama

Eros and Power in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786431652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 557

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book features five plays from the English Renaissance that explore political questions and developments by telling stories about the erotic impulses of a ruler. The volume contains fully annotated and modernized versions of Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Massinger's The Duke of Milan, Davenant's The Cruel Brother, and Ford's Love's Sacrifice. The editor provides an introduction, initial discussion, and selected illustration(s) for each play, along with an introduction to erotic politics and the Renaissance-era political mentality. A bibliography includes suggestions for further reading and a list of useful websites for students.

A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture PDF Author: Michael Hattaway
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 140518762X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1267

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Book Description
In this revised and greatly expanded edition of the Companion, 80 scholars come together to offer an original and far-reaching assessment of English Renaissance literature and culture. A new edition of the best-selling Companion to English Renaissance Literature, revised and updated, with 22 new essays and 19 new illustrations Contributions from some 80 scholars including Judith H. Anderson, Patrick Collinson, Alison Findlay, Germaine Greer, Malcolm Jones, Arthur Kinney, James Knowles, Arthur Marotti, Robert Miola and Greg Walker Unrivalled in scope and its exploration of unfamiliar literary and cultural territories the Companion offers new readings of both ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ texts Features essays discussing material culture, sectarian writing, the history of the body, theatre both in and outside the playhouses, law, gardens, and ecology in early modern England Orientates the beginning student, while providing advanced students and faculty with new directions for their research All of the essays from the first edition, along with the recommendations for further reading, have been reworked or updated

Poison on the early modern English stage

Poison on the early modern English stage PDF Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526159910
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry PDF Author: Wendy Beth Hyman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019257440X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers' anticipated decline, and—quite stunningly given the Reformation context—humanity's relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian 'desert of vast Eternity.' In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poets invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric's own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, positioned it to grapple with these 'impossible' metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, the book also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyrical mode. Carpe diem's revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.

Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare

Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare PDF Author: Daisy Murray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317199634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This volume investigates the early modern understanding of twinship through new readings of plays, informed by discussions of twins appearing in such literature as anatomy tracts, midwifery manuals, monstrous birth broadsides, and chapbooks. The book contextualizes such dramatic representations of twinship, investigating contemporary discussions about twins in medical and popular literature and how such dialogues resonate with the twin characters appearing on the early modern stage. Garofalo demonstrates that, in this period, twin births were viewed as biologically aberrant and, because of this classification, authors frequently attempt to explain the phenomenon in ways which call into question the moral and constitutional standing of both the parents and the twins themselves. In line with current critical studies on pregnancy and the female body, discussions of twin births reveal a distrust of the mother and the processes surrounding twin conception; however, a corresponding suspicion of twins also emerges, which monstrous birth pamphlets exemplify. This book analyzes the representation of twins in early modern drama in light of this information, moving from tragedies through to comedies. This progression demonstrates how the dramatic potential inherent in the early modern understanding of twinship is capitalized on by playwrights, as negative ideas about twins can be seen transitioning into tragic and tragicomic depictions of twinship. However, by building toward a positive, comic representation of twins, the work additionally suggests an alternate interpretation of twinship in this period, which appreciates and celebrates twins because of their difference. The volume will be of interest to those studying Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in relation to the History of Emotions, the Body, and the Medical Humanities.

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191609676
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them with the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern world: almost all of the histories depict events during the Hundred Years War, and King John glances even further back to the thirteenth-century Angevins; several of the comedies, tragedies, and romances rest on medieval sources; and there are important medieval antecedents for some of the poetic modes in which he worked as well. Several of the essays reread Shakespeare by recovering aspects of his works that are derived from medieval traditions and whose significance has been obscured by the desire to read Shakespeare as the origin of the modern. These essays, taken cumulatively, challenge the idea of any decisive break between the medieval period and early modernity by demonstrating continuities of form and imagination that clearly bridge the gap. Other essays explore the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries constructed or imagined relationships between past and present. Attending to the way these writers thought about their relationship to the past makes it possible, in turn, to read against the grain of our own teleological investment in the idea of early modernity. A third group of essays reads texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as documents participating in social-cultural transformation from within. This means attending to the way they themselves grapples with the problem of change, attempting to respond to new conditions and pressures while holding onto customary habits of thought and imagination. Taken together, the essays in this volume revisit the very idea of transition in a refreshingly non-teleological way.

Shakespeare's Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture

Shakespeare's Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture PDF Author: Ms Agnès Lafont
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472406672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Taking cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches to the volume’s subject, this exciting collection of essays offers a reassessment of Shakespeare’s erotic and Ovidian mythology within classical and continental aesthetic contexts. Through extensive examination of mythological visual and textual material, scholars explore the transmission and reinvention of Ovidian eroticism in Shakespeare’s plays to show how early modern artists and audiences collectively engaged in redefining ways of thinking pleasure. Within the collection’s broad-ranging investigation of erotic mythology in Renaissance culture, each chapter analyses specific instances of textual and pictorial transmission, reception, and adaptation. Through various critical strategies, contributors trace Shakespeare’s use of erotic material to map out the politics and aesthetics of pleasure, unravelling the ways in which mythology informs artistic creation. Received acceptions of neo-platonic love and the Petrarchan tensions of unattainable love are revisited, with a focus on parodic and darker strains of erotic desire, such as Priapic and Dionysian energies, lustful fantasy and violent eros. The dynamics of interacting tales is explored through their structural ability to adapt to the stage. Myth in Renaissance culture ultimately emerges not merely as near-inexhaustible source material for the Elizabethan and Jacobean arts, but as a creative process in and of itself.

The Rhetoric of the Page

The Rhetoric of the Page PDF Author: Laurie E. Maguire
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198862105
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A readable account of the book as an object: a history of the page as well as a history of the book. Drawing an arc from the medieval scriptorium to googlebooks, this volume shows the creative and playful opportunities blank spaces on the page afforded readers and writers.

Critical Analyses in English Renaissance Drama

Critical Analyses in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: Brownell Salomon
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879721251
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.

English Renaissance Drama

English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: David M Bevington
Publisher: Humanities-Ebooks
ISBN: 1847603041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description