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Author: John Kerrigan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191074853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 635
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Book Description
This remarkable, innovative book explores the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges, and the other utterances and acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come. In early modern England, such binding language was everywhere. Oaths of office, marriage vows, legal bonds, and casual, everyday profanity gave shape and texture to life. The proper use of such language, and the extent of its power to bind, was argued over by lawyers, religious writers, and satirists, and these debates inform literature and drama. Shakespeare's Binding Language gives a freshly researched account of these contexts, but it is focused on Shakespeare's plays. What motives should we look for when characters asseverate or promise? How far is binding language self-persuasive or deceptive? When is it allowable to break a vow? How do oaths and promises structure an audience's expectations? Across the sweep of Shakespeare's career, from the early histories to the late romances, this book opens new perspectives on key dramatic moments and illuminates language and action. Each chapter gives an account of a play or group of plays, yet the study builds to a sustained investigation of some of the most important systems, institutions, and controversies in early modern England, and of the wiring of Shakespearean dramaturgy. Scholarly but accessible, and offering startling insights, this is a major contribution to Shakespeare studies by one of the leading figures in the field.
Author: John Kerrigan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191074853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 635
Get Book Here
Book Description
This remarkable, innovative book explores the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges, and the other utterances and acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come. In early modern England, such binding language was everywhere. Oaths of office, marriage vows, legal bonds, and casual, everyday profanity gave shape and texture to life. The proper use of such language, and the extent of its power to bind, was argued over by lawyers, religious writers, and satirists, and these debates inform literature and drama. Shakespeare's Binding Language gives a freshly researched account of these contexts, but it is focused on Shakespeare's plays. What motives should we look for when characters asseverate or promise? How far is binding language self-persuasive or deceptive? When is it allowable to break a vow? How do oaths and promises structure an audience's expectations? Across the sweep of Shakespeare's career, from the early histories to the late romances, this book opens new perspectives on key dramatic moments and illuminates language and action. Each chapter gives an account of a play or group of plays, yet the study builds to a sustained investigation of some of the most important systems, institutions, and controversies in early modern England, and of the wiring of Shakespearean dramaturgy. Scholarly but accessible, and offering startling insights, this is a major contribution to Shakespeare studies by one of the leading figures in the field.
Author: John Kerrigan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198757581
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 635
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Book Description
Shakespeare's Binding Language is an innovative, substantial but highly readable study exploring the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges and the other verbal and performative acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come.
Author: Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350055506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare's World explores Shakespeare's complex art of insults and shows how the playwright set abusive words at the heart of many of his plays. It provides valuable insights on a key aspect of Shakespeare's work that has been little explored to date. Focusing on the most memorable scenes of insult, abusive characters and insulting effects in the plays, the volume shifts how readers understand and read Shakespeare's insults. Chapters analyze the spectacular rhetoric of insult in Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens; the 'skirmishes of wit' in Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream; insult and duelling codes in Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, the complex relationships between slander and insult in Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure; the taming of the tongue in Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, the trauma of insults in Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline and insult beyond words in Henry V and King lear. Grasping insult as a specific speech act, the volume explores the issues of verbal violence and verbal shields and the importance of reception and interpretation in matters of insult. It offers a panorama of the Elizabethan politics of insult and redefines Shakespeare's drama as a theatre of insults.
Author: John Drakakis
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526157853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Geoffrey Bullough’s The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957-75) established a vocabulary and a method for linking Shakespeare’s plays with a series of texts on which they were thought to be based. Shakespeare’s Resources revisits and interrogates the methodology that has prevailed since then and proposes a number of radical departures from Bullough’s model. The tacitly accepted linear model of ‘source’ and ‘influence’ that critics and scholars have wrestled with is here reconceptualised as a dynamic process in which texts interact and generate meanings that domesticated versions of intertextuality do not adequately account for. The investigation uncovers questions of exactly how Shakespeare ‘read’, what he read, the practical conditions in which narratives were encountered, and how he re-deployed earlier versions that he had used in his later work.
Author: Alex Garganigo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148750098X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
Samson's Cords examines the radically different responses of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Samuel Butler to the existential crises caused by an explosion of loyalty oaths in Britain before and after 1660.
Author: Ceri Sullivan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599267
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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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?
Author: Laura Kolb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192603507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
In Shakespeare's England, credit was synonymous with reputation, and reputation developed in the interplay of language, conduct, and social interpretation. As a consequence, artful language and social hermeneutics became practical, profitable skills. Since most people both used credit and extended it, the dual strategies of implication and inference—of producing and reading evidence—were everywhere. Like poetry or drama, credit was constructed: fashioned out of the interplay of artifice and interpretation. The rhetorical dimension of economic relations produced social fictions on a range of scales: from transitory performances facilitating local transactions to the long-term project of maintaining creditworthiness to the generalized social indeterminacy that arose from the interplay of performance and interpretation. Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living”: practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction.
Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108496172
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Perry reveals Shakespeare derived modes of tragic characterization, previously seen as presciently modern, via engagement with Rome and Senecan tragedy.
Author: Charlotte Scott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192563777
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This book examines the child on Shakespeare's stage. As a life force, an impassioned plea for justice, a legacy, history, memory or image of love or violence, children are everywhere in Shakespeare's plays. Focusing on Shakespeare's unique interest in the young body, the life stage, and the parental and social dynamic, this book offers the first sustained account of the role and representation of the child in Shakespeare's dramatic imagination. Drawing on a vast range of contemporary texts, including parenting manuals and household and pedagogic texts, as well as books on nursing and maternity, child birth, and child rearing, The Child in Shakespeare explores the contexts in which the idea of the child is mobilised as a body and image on the early modern stage. Understanding the child, not only as a specific life stage, but also as a role and an abstraction of feeling, this book examines why Shakespeare, who showed little interest in writing for children in the playing companies, wrote so powerfully about them on his stage.
Author: Gary Watt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198877099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Law appreciates Shakespeare and his works as expressions of an English early modern culture in which the shared rhetorical practices of dramatists and lawyers were informed by the renaissance of classical practice. It argues that Shakespeare was not primarily concerned with the technical accuracy of law, legal ideas, and legal performances, but with their capacity to generate dramatic interest through dispute, trial, the breaking of bonds, and the bending of rules. It follows that all Shakespeare's plays are in a sense “law plays”. Rhetorical practices can emerge as performances of power, but in Shakespeare's works they show more as instances of the human instinct to challenge power by playing with rules. Shakespeare employs the special magic of legal language, actions, and materials to conjure playgoers to act as a critical jury to events transacted on stage. This calls for close attention to Shakespeare's poetic sound effects and the ways they prompt audiences to confer a fair hearing.
