Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: John E. Curran,, Jr.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611495059
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This book explores representations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside Shakespearean exceptionalism, the study reads a wide variety of plays to explain how intellectual context could allow for such characterization.

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama

Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama PDF Author: John E. Curran,, Jr.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611495059
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores representations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside Shakespearean exceptionalism, the study reads a wide variety of plays to explain how intellectual context could allow for such characterization.

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.

The Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture

The Routledge Research Companion to Anglo-Italian Renaissance Literature and Culture PDF Author: Michele Marrapodi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044169
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 679

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Book Description
The aim of this Companion volume is to provide scholars and advanced graduate students with a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research work on Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies. Written by a team of international scholars and experts in the field, the chapters are grouped into two large areas of influence and intertextuality, corresponding to the dual way in which early modern England looked upon the Italian world from the English perspective – Part 1: "Italian literature and culture" and Part 2: "Appropriations and ideologies". In the first part, prominent Italian authors, artists, and thinkers are examined as a direct source of inspiration, imitation, and divergence. The variegated English response to the cultural, ideological, and political implications of pervasive Italian intertextuality, in interrelated aspects of artistic and generic production, is dealt with in the second part. Constructed on the basis of a largely interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers an in-depth and wide-ranging treatment of the multifaceted ways in which Italy’s material world and its iconologies are represented, appropriated, and exploited in the literary and cultural domain of early modern England. For this reason, contributors were asked to write essays that not only reflect current thinking but also point to directions for future research and scholarship, while a purposefully conceived bibliography of primary and secondary sources and a detailed index round off the volume.

The genres of Renaissance tragedy

The genres of Renaissance tragedy PDF Author: Daniel Cadman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526138271
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
These twelve new essays show the variety and versatility of Renaissance tragedy and highlight the issues it explores. Each chapter defines a particular kind of Renaissance tragedy and offers new research on a particularly striking example. Collectively the essays offer a critical overview of Renaissance tragedy as a genre.

Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Reader

Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Reader PDF Author: Domenico Lovascio
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350049913
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: - Essays on the play's critical and performance history - A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play - A selection of new essays by leading scholars - A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online Antony and Cleopatra is among Shakespeare's most enduringly popular tragedies. A theatrical piece of extraordinary political power, it also features one of his most memorable couples. Both intellectually and emotionally challenging, Antony and Cleopatra also tests the boundaries of theatrical representation. This volume offers a stimulating and accessible guide to the play that takes stock of the past and current situation of scholarship while simultaneously opening up fresh, thought-provoking critical perspectives.

Face-to-Face in Shakespearean Drama

Face-to-Face in Shakespearean Drama PDF Author: Matthew James Smith
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147443570X
Category : Acting
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This book celebrates the theatrical excitement and philosophical meanings of human interaction in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art PDF Author: Rhodri Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691246718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
A new account of Shakespearean tragedy as a response to life in an uncertain world In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it—of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter. After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare’s tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author’s nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning—from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis’s Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us. A major reevaluation of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.

Reviving Cicero in Drama

Reviving Cicero in Drama PDF Author: Gesine Manuwald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786725584
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The influence of Cicero is everywhere to be found. His rhetorical and philosophical writings have made an inescapable impact on the history of western culture, impressing figures such as Augustine, Jerome, Petrarch, Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Locke, David Hume, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Despite his wide appeal, until now no study has yet offered a comprehensive overview of 'Cicero' as a character in stage plays in the early modern and modern periods. The first book of its kind to discuss Cicero's reception on stage, it includes works by Ben Jonson (1611, Catiline His Conspiracy), Voltaire (1752, Rome sauvée, ou Catilina), Richard Cumberland (1761, The Banishment of Cicero), Henry Bliss (1847, Cicero, A drama) and, most recently, Mike Poulton (Imperium, adapted from the novels of Robert Harris in 2017). Through a chapter-by-chapter account of each play in turn, every oeuvre is placed in its historical and cultural context; the plots are discussed in relation to the ancient sources. These analyses demonstrate how the presentation and assessment of the figure of Cicero develop over time and how this character is exploited for varying political statements. The wealth of material in this book is vital reading for scholars of Classics, drama and literary studies as well as historians of ideas and of the early modern age.

Religions in Shakespeare's Writings

Religions in Shakespeare's Writings PDF Author: David V. Urban
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3039281941
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Offering a wide range of scholarly perspectives, Religions in Shakespeare’s Writings explores Shakespeare’s depictions, throughout his canon, of various religions and matters related to them. This collection’s fifteen essays explore matters pertaining to Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan Christianity, the Albigensian heresy of the high middle ages, Islam, Judaism, Roman religion, different manifestations of religious paganism, and even the “religion of Shakespeare” practiced by Shakespeare’s nineteenth-century admirers. These essays analyze how Shakespeare depicts both tensions between religions and the syntheses of different religious expressions on topics as diverse as Shakespeare’s varied portrayals of the afterlife, religious experience in Measure for Measure, and Black natural law and The Tempest. This collection also explores the political ramifications of religion within Shakespeare’s works, as well as Shakespeare’s multifaceted uses of the Bible. Additionally, while this collection does not present a Shakespeare whose particular religious beliefs can definitely be known or are displayed uniformly throughout his canon, various essays consider to what extent Shakespeare’s individual works demonstrate a Christian foundation. Contributors include John D. Cox, Cyndia Susan Clegg, Grace Tiffany, Matthew J. Smith, Bethany C. Besteman, Sarah Skwire, Feisal Mohamed, Benedict J. Whalen, Benjamin Lockerd, Bryan Adams Hampton, Debra Johanyak, John E. Curran, Emily E. Stelzer, David V. Urban, and Julia Reinhard Lupton.

Bodies complexioned

Bodies complexioned PDF Author: Mark S. Dawson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526134500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Bodily contrasts – from the colour of hair, eyes and skin to the shape of faces and skeletons – allowed the English of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to discriminate systematically among themselves and against non-Anglophone groups. Making use of an array of sources, this book examines how early modern English people understood bodily difference. It demonstrates that individuals’ distinctive features were considered innate, even as discrete populations were believed to have characteristics in common, and challenges the idea that the humoral theory of bodily composition was incompatible with visceral inequality or racism. While ‘race’ had not assumed its modern valence, and ‘racial’ ideologies were still to come, such typecasting nonetheless had mundane, lasting consequences. Grounded in humoral physiology, and Christian universalism notwithstanding, bodily prejudices inflected social stratification, domestic politics, sectarian division and international relations.