Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners PDF Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192529927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners is a highly original contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. It breaks important new ground in introducing readers, lay and scholarly alike, to the existence and character of the political culture of the mass of ordinary commoners in Shakespeare's England, as revealed by the recent findings of 'the new social history'. The volume thereby helps to challenge the traditional myths of a non-political commons and a culture of obedience. It also brings together leading Shakespeareans, who digest recent social history, with eminent early modern social historians, who turn their focus on Shakespeare. This genuinely cross-disciplinary approach generates fresh readings of over ten of Shakespeare's plays and locates the impress on Shakespearean drama of popular political thought and pressure in this period of perceived crisis. The volume is unique in engaging and digesting the dramatic importance of the discoveries of the new social history, thereby resituating and revaluing Shakespeare within the social depth of politics.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners PDF Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192529927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners is a highly original contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. It breaks important new ground in introducing readers, lay and scholarly alike, to the existence and character of the political culture of the mass of ordinary commoners in Shakespeare's England, as revealed by the recent findings of 'the new social history'. The volume thereby helps to challenge the traditional myths of a non-political commons and a culture of obedience. It also brings together leading Shakespeareans, who digest recent social history, with eminent early modern social historians, who turn their focus on Shakespeare. This genuinely cross-disciplinary approach generates fresh readings of over ten of Shakespeare's plays and locates the impress on Shakespearean drama of popular political thought and pressure in this period of perceived crisis. The volume is unique in engaging and digesting the dramatic importance of the discoveries of the new social history, thereby resituating and revaluing Shakespeare within the social depth of politics.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners PDF Author: Christopher Fitter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191846557
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the politics of commoners is a highly original contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. It breaks important new ground in introducing readers, lay and scholarly alike, to the existence and character of the political culture of the mass of ordinary commoners in Shakespeare's England, as revealed by the recent findings of 'the new social history'. The volume thereby helps to challenge the traditional myths of a non-political commons and a culture of obedience. It also brings together leading Shakespeareans, who digest recent social history, with eminent early modern social historians, who turn their focus on Shakespeare. This genuinely cross-disciplinary approach generates fresh readings of over ten of Shakespeare's plays and locates the impress on Shakespearean drama of popular political thought and pressure in this period of perceived crisis. The volume is unique in engaging and digesting the dramatic importance of the discoveries of the new social history, thereby resituating and revaluing Shakespeare within the social depth of politics.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners PDF Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198806892
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners is a highly original contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. It breaks important new ground in introducing readers, lay and scholarly alike, to the existence and character of the political culture of the mass of ordinary commoners in Shakespeare's England, as revealed by the recent findings of 'the new social history'. The volume thereby helps to challenge the traditional myths of a non-political commons and a culture of obedience. It also brings together leading Shakespeareans, who digest recent social history, with eminent early modern social historians, who turn their focus on Shakespeare. This genuinely cross-disciplinary approach generates fresh readings of over ten of Shakespeare's plays and locates the impress on Shakespearean drama of popular political thought and pressure in this period of perceived crisis. The volume is unique in engaging and digesting the dramatic importance of the discoveries of the new social history, thereby resituating and revaluing Shakespeare within the social depth of politics.

Shakespeare and the Body Politic

Shakespeare and the Body Politic PDF Author: Bernard J. Dobski
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739170961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
mate Shakespeare’s corpus, and one of the most prominent is the image of the body. Sketched out in the eternal lines of his plays and poetry, and often drawn in exquisite detail, variations on the body metaphor abound in the works of Shakespeare. Attention to the political dimensions of this metaphor in Shakespeare and the Body Politic permits readers to examine the sentiments of romantic love and family life, the enjoyment of peace, prosperity and justice, and the spirited pursuit of honor and glory as they inevitably emerge within the social, moral, and religious limits of particular political communities. The lessons to be learned from such an examination are both timely and timeless. For the tensions between the desires and pursuits of individuals and the health of the community forge the sinews of every body politic, regardless of the form it may take or even where and when one might encounter it. In his plays and poetry Shakespeare illuminates these tensions within the body politic, which itself constitutes the framework for a flourishing community of human beings and citizens—from the ancient city-states of Greece and Rome to the Christian cities and kingdoms of early modern Europe. The contributors to this volume attend to the political context and role of political actors within the diverse works of Shakespeare that they explore. Their arguments thus exhibit together Shakespeare’s political thought. By examining his plays and poetry with the seriousness they deserve, Shakespeare’s audiences and readers not only discover an education in human and political virtue, but also find themselves written into his lines. Shakespeare’s body of work is indeed politic, and the whole that it forms incorporates us all.

Radical Shakespeare

Radical Shakespeare PDF Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136575820
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This book argues that Shakespeare was permanently preoccupied with the brutality, corruption, and ultimate groundlessness of the political order of his state, and that the impact of original Tudor censorship, supplemented by the relatively depoliticizing aesthetic traditions of later centuries, have together obscured the consistent subversiveness of his work. Traditionally, Shakespeare’s political attitudes have been construed either as primarily conservative, or as essays in richly imaginative ambiguation, irreducible to settled viewpoints. Fitter contends that government censorship forced superficial acquiescence upon Shakespeare in establishment ideologies — monarchic, aristocratic and patriarchal — that were enunciated through rhetorical set pieces, but that Shakespeare the dramatist learned from Shakespeare the actor a variety of creative methods for sabotaging those perspectives in performance in the public theatres. Using historical contextualizations and recuperation of original performance values, the book argues that Shakespeare emerged as a radical writer not in middle age with King Lear and Coriolanus — plays whose radicalism is becoming widely recognized — but from his outset, with Henry VI and Taming of the Shrew. Recognizing Shakespeare’s allusiveness to 1590s controversies and dissident thought, and recovering the subtextual politics of Shakespeare’s distinctive stagecraft reveals populist, at times even radical meaning and a substantially new, and astonishingly interventionist, Shakespeare.

Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe

Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe PDF Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare’s politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that "Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare’s Histories and Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values. Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth’s principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England’s most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in Richard II and Henry IV a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth’s throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art PDF Author: Rhodri Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691246696
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"In this book Rhodri Lewis argues that Shakespeare's tragedies are a series of experiments that attempt to tell the truth about the world as Shakespeare sees it, and to discover how far he can stretch tragic affirmation to accommodate the darker aspects of this vision. Lewis argues that Shakespeare worked hard to develop an understanding of what tragedy might be good for; that this understanding emerged from his engagement with the traditions of tragic writing and theorizing that had gone before him; that he used this understanding to shape his tragic plays as carefully patterned aesthetic wholes; and that Shakespeare's understanding of the tragic has "as little to do with Hegel as it does with the unities of tragic time, place, and action that many of Shakespeare's peers and successors busied themselves abstracting from Aristotle's Poetics." Lewis begins the book by tracing the ideas and practices of tragedy as they were known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the sixteenth century. He then takes a chronological approach to Shakespeare's plays, ultimately seeking to affirm the status of dramatic art in Shakespeare's time as a medium for telling the truth about the human experience in a world that is not fully susceptible to rational analysis"--

Shakespeare's liminal spaces

Shakespeare's liminal spaces PDF Author: Ben Haworth
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526165910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This engaging study appreciably advances recent critical developments in the way the playwright created his worlds to reflect concurrent cartographic, geopolitical and social anxieties. In seeking to expose the dynamics and fluctuations of power on the stage, Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare’s forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures. Haworth’s nuanced consideration of these spaces reveals that they were ideally suited to the staging of social frictions as he traces the shifting balance of power between opposing ideological standpoints and the internal struggles between an emergent subjectivity and conformity with the centralised authorities of Church and Court.

The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature

The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature PDF Author: Ben Clarke
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040172253
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 621

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Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature provides an overview of the history, theory, and analysis of working-class literature. Taking a global and intersectional approach, the Companion demonstrates that literature is central to the (re)interpretation of the working class, a process that involves rereading the past as well as mapping the present. The collection examines how working-class literature is defined and the functions the term serves. It maps current debates and traces the ways in which a wide variety of theoretical and political movements have shaped the field. Challenging the stereotypical view that working-class writing is concerned solely with white, male industrial labourers in the Global North, the volume features chapters on subjects from early modern writing about the poor in England to contemporary poetry by Asian migrant workers. Exploring the theoretical problems of writing about class as well as providing detailed readings of specific texts, it demonstrates the richness and diversity of this rapidly developing field and looks to the future of working-class literature. The Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature is an accessible, wide-ranging resource. It emphasizes difference and debate, bringing distinct texts, traditions, and critical perspectives into dialogue and is essential for any student or researcher looking at concepts of class within literary studies.

Shakespeare Survey 71: Volume 71

Shakespeare Survey 71: Volume 71 PDF Author: Peter Holland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110858487X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 978

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Book Description
The 71st in the annual series of volumes devoted to Shakespeare study and production. The articles, like those of volume 70, are drawn from the World Shakespeare Congress, held 400 years after Shakespeare's death, in July/August 2016 in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The theme is 'Re-Creating Shakespeare'.