Medieval Shakespeare

Medieval Shakespeare PDF Author: Ruth Morse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016274
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This book gives readers the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare from the perspectives of the late-medieval European traditions that surrounded him.

Medieval Shakespeare

Medieval Shakespeare PDF Author: Ruth Morse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016274
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This book gives readers the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare from the perspectives of the late-medieval European traditions that surrounded him.

Shakespeare's Medieval Craft

Shakespeare's Medieval Craft PDF Author: Kurt A. Schreyer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080145509X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
In Shakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare’s connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city’s cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects—as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors—to the Shakespearean stage.As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare’s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare’s stage—including the ass’s head of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth—were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Martha W. Driver
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786491655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare and the Medieval World

Shakespeare and the Medieval World PDF Author: Helen Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408138999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Helen Cooper's unique study examines how continuations of medieval culture into the early modern period, forged Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and poet. Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Alfred Thomas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319902180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Shakespeare and the Book

Shakespeare and the Book PDF Author: David Scott Kastan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521786515
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
An account of Shakespeare's plays as they were transformed from scripts into books.

Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness

Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness PDF Author: Sarah Beckwith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461103
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Shakespeare lived at a time when England was undergoing the revolution in ritual theory and practice we know as the English Reformation. With it came an unprecedented transformation in the language of religious life. Whereas priests had once acted as mediators between God and men through sacramental rites, Reformed theology declared the priesthood of all believers. What ensued was not the tidy replacement of one doctrine by another but a long and messy conversation about the conventions of religious life and practice. In this brilliant and strikingly original book, Sarah Beckwith traces the fortunes of this conversation in Shakespeare’s theater. Beckwith focuses on the sacrament of penance, which in the Middle Ages stood as the very basis of Christian community and human relations. With the elimination of this sacrament, the words of penance and repentance—"confess," "forgive," "absolve" —no longer meant (no longer could mean) what they once did. In tracing the changing speech patterns of confession and absolution, both in Shakespeare’s work and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture more broadly, Beckwith reveals Shakespeare’s profound understanding of the importance of language as the fragile basis of our relations with others. In particular, she shows that the post-tragic plays, especially Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, are explorations of the new regimes and communities of forgiveness. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell, Beckwith enables us to see these plays in an entirely new light, skillfully guiding us through some of the deepest questions that Shakespeare poses to his audiences.

Shakespeare's Book of Insults

Shakespeare's Book of Insults PDF Author: Medieval Muddle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781098595579
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
A collection of over 75 insults curated from William Shakespeare's famous literary works. Each insult is beautiful typography and includes a citation of the work's title and scene for reference. Take your effrontery to the next level! This pocket sized book makes a great gift for English majors, professors and theatre nerds. Be sure to include this little gem for your next librarian or book lover birthday or Christmas!Included are insults like: "Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat" and "Your abilities are too infant-like for doing much alone. "The last page includes a Shakespearean insult generator for a quick comeback in a tight spot.

Shakespeare and Abraham

Shakespeare and Abraham PDF Author: Ken Jackson
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 026808355X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
In Shakespeare and Abraham, Ken Jackson illuminates William Shakespeare’s dramatic fascination with the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Themes of child killing fill Shakespeare’s early plays: Genesis 22 informed Clifford’s attack on young Rutland in 3 Henry 6, Hubert’s providentially thwarted murder of Arthur in King John, and Aaron the Moor’s surprising decision to spare his son amidst the filial slaughters of Titus Andronicus, among others. However, the playwright’s full engagement with the biblical narrative does not manifest itself exclusively in scenes involving the sacrifice of children or in verbal borrowings from the famously sparse story of Abraham. Jackson argues that the most important influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is to be found in the conceptual framework that Shakespeare develops to explore relationships among ideas of religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. Jackson probes the Shakespearean texts from the vantage of modern theology and critical theory, while also orienting them toward the traditions concerning Abraham in Jewish, Pauline, patristic, medieval, and Reformation sources and early English drama. Consequently, the playwright’s “Abrahamic explorations” become strikingly apparent in unexpected places such as the “trial” of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the bifurcated structure of Timon of Athens. By situating Shakespeare in a complex genealogy that extends from ancient religion to postmodern philosophy, Jackson inserts Shakespeare into the larger contemporary conversation about religion in the modern world.

Tolkien and Shakespeare

Tolkien and Shakespeare PDF Author: Janet Brennan Croft
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786428279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Tolkien and Shakespeare: one a prolific popular dramatist and poet of the Elizabethan era, the other a twentieth-century scholar of Old English and author of a considerably smaller body of work. Though unquestionably very different writers, the two have more in common than one might expect. These essays focus on the broad themes and motifs which concerned both authors. They seek to uncover Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien through echoes of the playwright's themes and even word choices, discovering how Tolkien used, revised, updated, "corrected," and otherwise held an ongoing dialogue with Shakespeare's works. The depiction of Elves and the world of Faerie, and how humans interact with them, are some of the most obvious points of comparison and difference for the two writers. Both Tolkien and Shakespeare deeply explored the uses and abuses of power with princes, politics, war, and the lessons of history. Magic and prophecy were also of great concern to both authors, and the works of both are full of encounters with the Other: masks and disguises, mirrors that hide and reveal, or seeing stones that show only part of the truth.