Constructing Monsters in Shakespeare's Drama and Early Modern Culture

Constructing Monsters in Shakespeare's Drama and Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Mark Thornton Burnett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403919356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture argues for the crucial place of the 'monster' in the early modern imagination. Burnett traces the metaphorical significance of 'monstrous' forms across a range of early modern exhibition spaces - fairground displays, 'cabinets of curiosity' and court entertainments - to contend that the 'monster' finds its most intriguing manifestation in the investments and practices of contemporary theatre. The study's new readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson make a powerful case for the drama's contribution to debates about the 'extraordinary body'.

Constructing Monsters in Shakespeare's Drama and Early Modern Culture

Constructing Monsters in Shakespeare's Drama and Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Mark Thornton Burnett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403919356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture argues for the crucial place of the 'monster' in the early modern imagination. Burnett traces the metaphorical significance of 'monstrous' forms across a range of early modern exhibition spaces - fairground displays, 'cabinets of curiosity' and court entertainments - to contend that the 'monster' finds its most intriguing manifestation in the investments and practices of contemporary theatre. The study's new readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson make a powerful case for the drama's contribution to debates about the 'extraordinary body'.

Constructing Monsters in Shakespeare's Drama and Early Modern Culture

Constructing Monsters in Shakespeare's Drama and Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Mark Thornton Burnett
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349422944
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture argues for the crucial place of the 'monster' in the early modern imagination. Burnett traces the metaphorical significance of 'monstrous' forms across a range of early modern exhibition spaces - fairground displays, 'cabinets of curiosity' and court entertainments - to contend that the 'monster' finds its most intriguing manifestation in the investments and practices of contemporary theatre. The study's new readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson make a powerful case for the drama's contribution to debates about the 'extraordinary body'.

Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture

Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture PDF Author: Wes Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199577021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Wes Williams explores the place of monsters in the early modern imagination, charting the migration of the monstrous from natural history to moral philosophy, from descriptions of creatures found in the external world to the drama of human motivation, of sexual and political identity. At its centre are readings of major works of French literature.

A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume I

A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume I PDF Author: Richard Dutton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470997273
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare’s tragedies contains original essays on every tragedy from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus as well as thirteen additional essays on such topics as Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies, Shakespeare’s tragedies on film, Shakespeare’s tragedies of love, Hamlet in performance, and tragic emotion in Shakespeare.

Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare

Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare PDF Author: Daisy Murray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317199634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This volume investigates the early modern understanding of twinship through new readings of plays, informed by discussions of twins appearing in such literature as anatomy tracts, midwifery manuals, monstrous birth broadsides, and chapbooks. The book contextualizes such dramatic representations of twinship, investigating contemporary discussions about twins in medical and popular literature and how such dialogues resonate with the twin characters appearing on the early modern stage. Garofalo demonstrates that, in this period, twin births were viewed as biologically aberrant and, because of this classification, authors frequently attempt to explain the phenomenon in ways which call into question the moral and constitutional standing of both the parents and the twins themselves. In line with current critical studies on pregnancy and the female body, discussions of twin births reveal a distrust of the mother and the processes surrounding twin conception; however, a corresponding suspicion of twins also emerges, which monstrous birth pamphlets exemplify. This book analyzes the representation of twins in early modern drama in light of this information, moving from tragedies through to comedies. This progression demonstrates how the dramatic potential inherent in the early modern understanding of twinship is capitalized on by playwrights, as negative ideas about twins can be seen transitioning into tragic and tragicomic depictions of twinship. However, by building toward a positive, comic representation of twins, the work additionally suggests an alternate interpretation of twinship in this period, which appreciates and celebrates twins because of their difference. The volume will be of interest to those studying Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in relation to the History of Emotions, the Body, and the Medical Humanities.

Shakespearean Gothic

Shakespearean Gothic PDF Author: Christy Desmet
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 070832262X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book explores the paradox that the Gothic (today's werewolves, vampires, and horror movies) owe their origins (and their legitimacy) to eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare. As Shakespeare was being established as the supreme British writer throughout the century, he was cited as justification for early Gothic writers' fascination with the supernatural, their abandoning of literary "decorum," and their fascination with otherness and extremes of every kind. This book addresses the gap for an up to date analysis of Shakespeare's relation to the Gothic. An authority on the Gothic, E.J. Clery, has stated that "It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of Shakespeare as touchstone and inspiration for the terror mode, even if we feel the offspring are unworthy of their parent. Scratch the surface of any Gothic fiction and the debt to Shakespeare will be there." This book therefore addresses Shakespeare's importance to the Gothic tradition as a whole and also to particular, well-known and often studied Gothic works. It also considers the influence of the Gothic on Shakespeare, both in-print and on stage in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. The introductory chapter places the chapters within the historical development of both Shakespearean reception and Gothic Studies. The book is divided into three parts: 1) Gothic Appropriations of "Shakespeare"; 2) Rewriting Shakespearean Plays and Characters; 3) Shakespeare Before/After the Gothic.

Shakespeare's Insults

Shakespeare's Insults PDF Author: Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474252672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
Why are certain words used as insults in Shakespeare's world and what do these words do and say? Shakespeare's plays abound with insults which are more often merely cited than thoroughly studied, quotation prevailing over exploration. The purpose of this richly detailed dictionary is to go beyond the surface of these words and to analyse why and how words become insults in Shakespeare's world. It's an invaluable resource and reference guide for anyone grappling with the complexities and rewards of Shakespeare's inventive use of language in the realm of insult and verbal sparring.

Illyria in Shakespeare’s England

Illyria in Shakespeare’s England PDF Author: Lea Puljcan Juric
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683931777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Illyria in Shakespeare’s England is the first extended study of the eastern Adriatic region, often referred to in the Renaissance by its Graeco-Roman name “Illyria,” in early modern English writing and political thought. At first glance the absence of earlier studies may not be surprising: that area may seem significant only to critics pursuing certain specialized questions about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which is set in Illyria. But in fact, it is not only often misrepresented in the discussions of that play but also typically ignored in the critical conversation on English prose romances, poems, and other plays that feature Illyria or its peoples, some rarely read, others well-known, including Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, 2 Henry VI, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline. Lea Puljcan Juric explores the reasons for such views by engaging with larger questions of interest to many critics who focus on subjects other than geographic regions, such as “othering,” religion, race, and the development of national identity, among other issues. She also broadens the conversation on these familiar problems in the field to include the impact of post-Renaissance notions of the Balkans on the erasure of Illyria from Shakespeare studies. Puljcan Juric studies the encounters of the English with the ancient and early modern Illyrians through their Greek and Roman heritage; geographies, histories, and travelogues, written in a variety of European polities including Illyria itself; religious conflict after the Reformation and the threat of Islam; and international politics and commerce. These considerations show how Illyria’s geopolitical position among the Ottoman Empire, Habsburg Empire and Venice, its “national” struggles as well as its cultural heterogeneity figured in English interests in the eastern Mediterranean, and informed English ideas about ethnicity, nationhood, and religion. In Shakespeare studies, however, critics have consistently cast Twelfth Night’s Illyria as a utopia, an enigma, or a substitute for England, Italy, or Greece. Arguing that twentieth-century politics and negative conceptions of the eastern Adriatic as part of “the Balkans” have underwritten this erasure of Illyria from our perspective on the field, Puljcan Juric shows how entrenched cultural hierarchies tied to elitism and colonial politics still inform our analyses of literature. She invites scholars to recognize that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Illyria is the site of important socio-political and cultural struggles during the period, some shared with neighboring areas, others geographically specific, that invite dynamic historical and literary scrutiny.

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century PDF Author: A. Brady
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230554873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This book analyzes the political, aesthetic, moral and religious developments in the period 1606-1660 and discusses the works of Donne, Jonson, Milton and early modern women's writing. Brady combines Literary Theory, social and cultural History, Psychology and Anthropology to produce exciting and original readings of neglected source material.

Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman

Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman PDF Author: M.L. Stapleton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317166450
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Contributions to this volume explore the idea of Marlowe as a working artist, in keeping with John Addington Symonds' characterization of him as a "sculptor-poet." Throughout the body of his work-including not only the poems and plays, but also his forays into translation and imitation-a distinguished company of established and emerging literary scholars traces how Marlowe conceives an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in his writing process. These essays necessarily overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, which signals their interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history, as well as interpretive issues within the works themselves. The contributors interpret and analyze the disputed facts of Marlowe's life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works, and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. The collection engages in new ways the controversies and complexities of its subject's life and art. It reflects the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as it shapes the twenty-first century conception of the poet and playwright as master craftsman.