Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England

Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England PDF Author: Bruce Thomas Boehrer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512800880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England, Bruce Thomas Boehrer argues that a preoccupation with incest is built not the dominant social and cultural concerns of early modern England. Proceeding from a study of Henry III's divorce and succession legislation, through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, this work examines the interrelation between family politics and literary expression in and around the English royal court.

Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England

Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England PDF Author: Bruce Thomas Boehrer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512800880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England, Bruce Thomas Boehrer argues that a preoccupation with incest is built not the dominant social and cultural concerns of early modern England. Proceeding from a study of Henry III's divorce and succession legislation, through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, this work examines the interrelation between family politics and literary expression in and around the English royal court.

Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England

Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England PDF Author: Judith Deborah Haber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521518679
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
This wide-ranging study uses close readings of texts by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton and Ford to investigate the intersections of erotic desire and dramatic form in the early modern period, considering to what extent disruptive desires can successfully challenge, change or undermine the structures in which they are embedded.

Tis Pity She's A Whore

Tis Pity She's A Whore PDF Author: Lisa Hopkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441137556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
John Ford's tragedy 'Tis Pity She's A Whore was first performed between 1629 and 1633 and since then its themes of incest, love versus duty and forbidden passion have made it a widely studied and performed, if controversial, play. This guide offers students an introduction to its critical and performance history, including TV and film adaptations. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further individual research.

Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World

Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Naomi J. Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351900161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
While the relationships between parents and children have long been a staple of critical inquiry, bonds between siblings have received far less attention among early modern scholars. Indeed, until now, no single volume has focused specifically on relations between brothers and sisters during the early modern period, nor do many essays or monographs address the topic. The essays in Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World focus attention on this neglected area, exploring the sibling dynamics that shaped family relations from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries in Italy, England, France, Spain, and Germany. Using an array of feminist and cultural studies approaches, prominent scholars consider sibling ties from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including art history, musicology, literary studies, and social history. By articulating some of the underlying paradigms according to which sibling relations were constructed, the collection seeks to stimulate further scholarly research and critical inquiry into this fruitful area of early modern cultural studies.

Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama

Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama PDF Author: Michael A. Winkelman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429559542
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
Originally published in 2005. While several recent studies have investigated the political dimensions of sixteenth-century English drama, until now there has not been a monograph that tells the story of how and why royal marital selection was examined. By linking court interludes, neoclassical university tragedies, and popular plays by late Elizabethan dramatists Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, and William Shakespeare to the inflammatory topic of Tudor marriage, Michael Winkelman demonstrates their cultural centrality. This new work interrogates the symbolic, allusive, and mimetic aspects of marital relationships in such plays. Winkelman argues that they were crucial battlegrounds for a series of consequential debates about the future of the monarchy, especially during the reigns of the oft-married King Henry VIII and his unmarried daughter, the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I. Marriage, as a critically important political metaphor as well as a pressing realpolitik quandary, was the subject of major debate in the drama and government of Tudor England. Royal conduct in the domestic sphere had a tremendous impact on the entire English social order, and in an age before widespread freedom of speech, court drama was often the only venue where the voicing of criticism was tolerated. The fascinating soap-opera story of Tudor marriage thus provides the author with a reference point for an interdisciplinary study of sixteenth-century theatre and politics. Drawing on evidence from playbooks and historical chronicles as well as contemporary work in gender studies, audience-response theory, and anthropology, this book explores how during a time of anxiety-inducing change, playwrights discussed controversies and propounded remedies; theatre played a pivotal role in shaping society.

The Horror Plays of the English Restoration

The Horror Plays of the English Restoration PDF Author: Anne Hermanson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317028546
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
A decade after the Restoration of Charles II, a disturbing group of tragedies, dubbed by modern critics the horror or the blood-and-torture villain tragedies, burst onto the London stage. Ten years later they were gone - absorbed into the partisan frenzy which enveloped the theatre at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. Despite burgeoning interest, until now there has been no full investigation into why these deeply unsettling plays were written when they were and why they so fascinated audiences for the period that they held the stage. The author’s contention is that the genre of horror gains its popularity at times of social dislocation. It reflects deep schisms in society, and English society was profoundly unsettled and in a (delayed) state of shock from years of social upheaval and civil conflict. Through recurrent images of monstrosity, madness, venereal disease, incest and atheism, Hermanson argues that the horror dramatists trope deep-seated and unresolved anxieties - engaging profoundly with contemporary discourse by abreacting the conspiratorial climate of suspicion and fear. Some go as far as to question unequivocally the moral and political value of monarchy, vilifying the office of kingship and pushing ideas of atheism further than in any drama produced since Seneca. This study marks the first comprehensive investigation of these macabre tragedies in which playwrights such as Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Shadwell, Elkanah Settle, Thomas Otway and the Earl of Rochester take their audience on an exploration of human iniquity, thrusting them into an examination of man’s relationship to God, power, justice and evil.

The Elizabethan World

The Elizabethan World PDF Author: Susan Doran
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317565797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 735

Get Book Here

Book Description
This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history. Featuring contributions from thirty-eight international scholars, the book takes a thematic approach to a period which saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the explorations of Francis Drake and Walter Ralegh, the establishment of the Protestant Church, the flourishing of commercial theatre and the works of Edmund Spencer, Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare. Encompassing social, political, cultural, religious and economic history, and crossing several disciplines, The Elizabethan World depicts a time of transformation, and a world order in transition. Topics covered include central and local government; political ideas; censorship and propaganda; parliament, the Protestant Church, the Catholic community; social hierarchies; women; the family and household; popular culture, commerce and consumption; urban and rural economies; theatre; art; architecture; intellectual developments ; exploration and imperialism; Ireland, and the Elizabethan wars. The volume conveys a vivid picture of how politics, religion, popular culture, the world of work and social practices fit together in an exciting world of change, and will be invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the Elizabethan period.

Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics

Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics PDF Author: Jason Gleckman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9813295996
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation on the plays of William Shakespeare. Taking three fundamental Protestant concerns of the era – (double) predestination, conversion, and free will – it demonstrates how Protestant theologians, in England and elsewhere, re-imagined these longstanding Christian concepts from a specifically Protestant perspective. Shakespeare utilizes these insights to generate his distinctive view of human nature and the relationship between humans and God. Through in-depth readings of the Shakespeare comedies ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and ‘Twelfth Night’, the romance ‘A Winter’s Tale’, and the tragedies of ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Hamlet’, this book examines the results of almost a century of Protestant thought upon literary art.

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction PDF Author: Julia Novak
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031090195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Showing Like a Queen

Showing Like a Queen PDF Author: Katherine Eggert
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812292618
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority. In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm. Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epic Paradise Lost upon the formulae of queenship.