Prayer, Despair, and Drama

Prayer, Despair, and Drama PDF Author: Peter Iver Kaufman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252022227
Category : Anglican Communion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Prayer, Despair, and Drama explores the godly sorrow of Elizabethan Calvinists and finds that what some have characterized as an evangelism of fear functioned more as a kind of religious therapy. In this major contribution to discussions of the relationship between religion and literature in Elizabethan England, Peter Iver Kaufman argues that the soul-searching and self-scourging typical of late Tudor Calvinism was reflected in the rhetoric of self-loathing then prevalent in sermons, sonnets, and soliloquys. Kaufman shows how this spiritual psychology informs major literary texts including Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, Donne's Holy Sonnets, and other works.

Prayer, Despair, and Drama

Prayer, Despair, and Drama PDF Author: Peter Iver Kaufman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252022227
Category : Anglican Communion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book

Book Description
Prayer, Despair, and Drama explores the godly sorrow of Elizabethan Calvinists and finds that what some have characterized as an evangelism of fear functioned more as a kind of religious therapy. In this major contribution to discussions of the relationship between religion and literature in Elizabethan England, Peter Iver Kaufman argues that the soul-searching and self-scourging typical of late Tudor Calvinism was reflected in the rhetoric of self-loathing then prevalent in sermons, sonnets, and soliloquys. Kaufman shows how this spiritual psychology informs major literary texts including Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, Donne's Holy Sonnets, and other works.

Religion and Drama in Early Modern England

Religion and Drama in Early Modern England PDF Author: Elizabeth Williamson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317068106
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.

Prayer and Performance in Early Modern English Literature

Prayer and Performance in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Joseph Sterrett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108429726
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Examines the performative aspects of prayer and how they were represented in literature in early modern England.

Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer

Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer PDF Author: Ceri Sullivan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599267
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Early modern private prayer is skilled at narrative and drama. In manuals and sermons on how to pray, collections of model prayers, scholarly treatises about biblical petitions, and popular tracts about life crises prompting calls to God, prayer is valued as a powerful agent of change. Model prayers create stories about people in distinct ranks and jobs, with concrete details about real-life situations. These characters may act in play-lets, or appear in the middle of difficulties, or voice a suite of petitions from all sides of a conflict. Thinking of early modern private prayers as dramatic dialogues rather than lyric monologues raises the question of whether play-going and praying were mutually reinforcing practices. Could dramatists deploying prayer on stage rely on having audience members who were already expert at making up roles for themselves in prayer, and who expected their petitions to have the power to intervene in major events? Does prayer's focus on cause and effect structure the historiography of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, Henry V, and Henry VIII?

Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England

Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England PDF Author: D. Coleman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230589642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This is the first book-length study of the relationship between early modern drama and sacramental ritual and theology. It examines dramatic forms, such as morality plays. Offering new insights into the religious practices on which early modern subjectivity is founded. Coleman offers radical new ways of reading canonical Renaissance plays.

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: John E. Curran
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644530538
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy studies instantiations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside such fraught questions as the history of Renaissance subjectivity and individualism on the one hand and Shakespearean exceptionalism on the other, we can find that in some plays, by a range of different authors and collaborators, a conception has been evidenced of who a particular person is, and has been used to drive the action. This evidence can take into account a number of internal and external factors that might differentiate a person, and can do so drawing on the intellectual context in a number of ways. Ideas with potential to emphasize the special over the general in envisioning the person might come from training in dialectic (thesis vs hypothesis) or in rhetoric (ethopoeia), from psychological frameworks (casuistry, humor theory, and their interpenetration), or from historiography (exemplarity). But though they depicted what we would call personality only intermittently, and with assumptions different from our own about personhood, dramatists sometimes made a priority of representing the workings of a specific mind: the patterns of thought and feeling that set a person off as that person and define that person singularly rather than categorically. Some individualistic characters can be shown to emerge where we do not expect, such as with Fletcherian personae like Amintor, Arbaces, and Montaigne of The Honest Man’s Fortune; some are drawn by playwrights often uninterested in character, such as Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Jonson’s Cicero, and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck; and some appear in being constructed differently from others by the same author, as when Webster’s Bosola is set in contrast to Flamineo, and Marlowe’s Faustus is set against Barabas. But Shakespearean characters are also examined for the particular manner in which each troubles the categorical and exhibits a personality: Othello, Good Duke Humphrey, and Marc Antony. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Sin and Salvation in Reformation England

Sin and Salvation in Reformation England PDF Author: Jonathan Willis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317054946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Notions of which behaviours comprised sin, and what actions might lead to salvation, sat at the heart of Christian belief and practice in early modern England, but both of these vitally important concepts were fundamentally reconfigured by the reformation. Remarkably little work has been undertaken exploring the ways in which these essential ideas were transformed by the religious changes of the sixteenth-century. In the field of reformation studies, revisionist scholarship has underlined the vitality of late-medieval English Christianity and the degree to which people remained committed to the practices of the Catholic Church up to the eve of the reformation, including those dealing with the mortification of sin and the promise of salvation. Such popular commitment to late-medieval lay piety has in turn raised questions about how the reformation itself was able to take root. Whilst post-revisionist scholars have explored a wide range of religious beliefs and practices - such as death, providence, angels, and music - there has been a surprising lack of engagement with the two central religious preoccupations of the vast majority of people. To address this omission, this collection focusses upon the history and theology of sin and salvation in reformation and post-reformation England. Exploring their complex social and cultural constructions, it underlines how sin and salvation were not only great religious constants, but also constantly evolving in order to survive in the rapidly transforming religious landscape of the reformation. Drawing upon a range of disciplinary perspectives - historical, theological, literary, and material/art-historical - to both reveal and explain the complexity of the concepts of sin and salvation, the volume further illuminates a subject central to the nature and success of the Reformation itself. Divided into four sections, Part I explores reformers’ attempts to define and re-define the theological concepts of sin and salvation, while Part II looks at some of the ways in which sin and salvation were contested: through confessional conflict, polemic, poetry and martyrology. Part III focuses on the practical attempts of English divines to reform sin with respect to key religious practices, while Part IV explores the significance of sin and salvation in the lived experience of both clergy and laity. Evenly balancing contributions by established academics in the field with cutting-edge contributions from junior researchers, this collection breaks new ground, in what one historian of the period has referred to as the ‘social history of theology’.

Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama

Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Jonathan Gil Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521032094
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the material, economic and dramatic implications of stage properties in early modern English drama. The essays in this volume, written by a team of distinguished scholars in the field, offer valuable insights and historical evidence concerning the forms of production, circulation and exchange that brought such diverse properties as sacred garments, household furnishings, pawned objects, and even false beards onto the stage.

George Gifford and the Reformation of the Common Sort

George Gifford and the Reformation of the Common Sort PDF Author: Timothy Scott McGinnis
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1935503413
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This careful study explores puritan attitudes through the life and works of Elizabethan minister George Gifford. He was on the front lines of religious controversies in a time when the English church was being shaped by Protestant evangelicals who felt compelled to carry their understanding of “true religion” to all corners of England. Known among themselves as “the godly” or “gospellers” and to their enemies as “puritans” or “precisionists,” these ministers believed the Church of England was only partially reformed. Gifford tried to convert the many parishioners whom he believed to be Protestant in name only, or “men indifferent” due to their acceptance of whatever religion was thrust upon them. Using archival records and Gifford's large corpus of published treatises, dialogues, and sermons, McGinnis looks at Gifford’s support and opposition in his ministry at Maldon, and his recurring conflicts with ecclesiastical authorities. He explores Gifford's writings on Catholicism, separatism, and witchcraft, and considers how Gifford’s attention to practical ministry interacted with national debates. McGinnis also analyzes Gifford's attempt to translate Protestant doctrines into a language accessible to the average layperson in his sermons and catechism. Those interested in popular religion and culture, pastoral ministry, and puritanism on both sides of the Atlantic will benefit from this study of one on the front lines of religious controversies during the turbulent years of Elizabeth's reign.

‘Practical Divinity’

‘Practical Divinity’ PDF Author: Kenneth L. Parker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351963198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Richard Greenham was one of the most important and respected figures among the Elizabethan clergy. His contemporaries described him as the founder of a previously unknown pastoral art: the cure of cases of conscience. Despite his fame in the Elizabethan period as a model pastor, pioneer in reformed casuistry, and founder of one of the first rectory seminaries, scholars have made little use of his life and works in their study of Elizabethan religious life. This study restores Richard Greenham to the central place he held in the development of Elizabethan Reformed parochial ministry. The monograph-length introduction includes a biography, an analysis of his pastoral style, and a study of his approach to curing cases of conscience. The transcription of Rylands English Manuscript 524, cross-referenced with the published editions of the sayings, offers a useful source to scholars who wish to study the collecting and ’framing’ process of the humanist pedagogical tradition. The selection of early published works includes Greenham’s (unfinished) catechism, treatises on the Sabbath and marriage, and advice on reading scripture and educating children.