Author: Jeffrey Knapp
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226445700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of popular entertainment. Yet as Jeffrey Knapp demonstrates in this radical new reading, a surprising number of writers throughout the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare himself, represented plays as supporting the cause of true religion. To be sure, Renaissance playwrights rarely sermonized in their plays, which seemed preoccupied with sex, violence, and crime. During a time when acting was regarded as a kind of vice, many theater professionals used their apparent godlessness to advantage, claiming that it enabled them to save wayward souls the church could not otherwise reach. The stage, they argued, made possible an ecumenical ministry, which would help transform Reformation England into a more inclusive Christian society. Drawing on a variety of little-known as well as celebrated plays, along with a host of other documents from the English Renaissance, Shakespeare's Tribe changes the way we think about Shakespeare and the culture that produced him. Winner of the Best Book in Literature and Language from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly division, the Conference on Christianity and Literature Book Award, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.
Shakespeare's Tribe
Author: Jeffrey Knapp
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226445700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of popular entertainment. Yet as Jeffrey Knapp demonstrates in this radical new reading, a surprising number of writers throughout the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare himself, represented plays as supporting the cause of true religion. To be sure, Renaissance playwrights rarely sermonized in their plays, which seemed preoccupied with sex, violence, and crime. During a time when acting was regarded as a kind of vice, many theater professionals used their apparent godlessness to advantage, claiming that it enabled them to save wayward souls the church could not otherwise reach. The stage, they argued, made possible an ecumenical ministry, which would help transform Reformation England into a more inclusive Christian society. Drawing on a variety of little-known as well as celebrated plays, along with a host of other documents from the English Renaissance, Shakespeare's Tribe changes the way we think about Shakespeare and the culture that produced him. Winner of the Best Book in Literature and Language from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly division, the Conference on Christianity and Literature Book Award, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226445700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of popular entertainment. Yet as Jeffrey Knapp demonstrates in this radical new reading, a surprising number of writers throughout the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare himself, represented plays as supporting the cause of true religion. To be sure, Renaissance playwrights rarely sermonized in their plays, which seemed preoccupied with sex, violence, and crime. During a time when acting was regarded as a kind of vice, many theater professionals used their apparent godlessness to advantage, claiming that it enabled them to save wayward souls the church could not otherwise reach. The stage, they argued, made possible an ecumenical ministry, which would help transform Reformation England into a more inclusive Christian society. Drawing on a variety of little-known as well as celebrated plays, along with a host of other documents from the English Renaissance, Shakespeare's Tribe changes the way we think about Shakespeare and the culture that produced him. Winner of the Best Book in Literature and Language from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly division, the Conference on Christianity and Literature Book Award, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.
Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions
Author: Gillian Woods
Publisher: Oxford English Monographs
ISBN: 0199671265
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions asks why Catholicism had such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice. Concentrating on dramatic impact, and integrating literary analysis with fresh historical research, Gillian Woods offers a new and engaging answer to this important question.
Publisher: Oxford English Monographs
ISBN: 0199671265
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions asks why Catholicism had such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice. Concentrating on dramatic impact, and integrating literary analysis with fresh historical research, Gillian Woods offers a new and engaging answer to this important question.
Secret Shakespeare
Author: Richard Wilson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152618415X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the last century. No biography of the Bard is now complete without chapters on the paranoia and persecution in which he was educated, or the treason which engulfed his family. Whether to suffer outrageous fortune or take up arms in suicidal resistance was, as Hamlet says, 'the question' that fired Shakespeare's stage. In 'Secret Shakespeare' Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived. Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a 'golden time' of future toleration, 'What's to come' is always unsure. Whether or not 'He died a papist', it is because we can never 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist. This is a fascinating work, which will be essential reading for all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies.
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152618415X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the last century. No biography of the Bard is now complete without chapters on the paranoia and persecution in which he was educated, or the treason which engulfed his family. Whether to suffer outrageous fortune or take up arms in suicidal resistance was, as Hamlet says, 'the question' that fired Shakespeare's stage. In 'Secret Shakespeare' Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived. Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a 'golden time' of future toleration, 'What's to come' is always unsure. Whether or not 'He died a papist', it is because we can never 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist. This is a fascinating work, which will be essential reading for all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies.
Shakespeare's World/world Shakespeares
Author: International Shakespeare Association. World Congress
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780874139891
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
This collection offers 29 essays by many of the world's major scholars of the extraordinary diversity and richness of Shakespeare studies today. It ranges from examinations of the society Shakespeare himself lived in, to recent films, plays, novels and operatic adaptations in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Middle East.
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780874139891
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
This collection offers 29 essays by many of the world's major scholars of the extraordinary diversity and richness of Shakespeare studies today. It ranges from examinations of the society Shakespeare himself lived in, to recent films, plays, novels and operatic adaptations in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Middle East.
Four Shakespearean Period Pieces
Author: Margreta de Grazia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022678536X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism. Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present. In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project. To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022678536X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism. Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present. In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project. To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.
Prison Shakespeare and the Purpose of Performance: Repentance Rituals and the Early Modern
Author: N. Herold
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137432675
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Over the last decade a number of prison theatre programs have developed to rehabilitate inmates by having them perform Shakespearean adaptations. This book focuses on how prison theatre today reveals certain elements of the early modern theatre that were themselves responses to cataclysmic changes in theological doctrine and religious practice.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137432675
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Over the last decade a number of prison theatre programs have developed to rehabilitate inmates by having them perform Shakespearean adaptations. This book focuses on how prison theatre today reveals certain elements of the early modern theatre that were themselves responses to cataclysmic changes in theological doctrine and religious practice.
Worldly Shakespeare
Author: Wilson Richard Wilson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474411339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
In Worldly Shakespeare Richard Wilson proposes that the universalism proclaimed in the name of Shakespeare's playhouse was tempered by his own worldliness, the performative idea that runs through his plays, that if 'All the world's a stage', then 'all the men and women in it' are 'merely players'. Situating this playacting in the context of current concerns about the difference between globalization and mondialisation, the book considers how this drama offers itself as a model for a planet governed not according to universal toleration, but the right to offend: 'But with good will'. For when he asks us to think we 'have but slumbered' throughout his offensive plays, Wilson suggests, Shakespeare is presenting a drama without catharsis, which anticipates post-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Rancire and Slavoj A iA ek, who insist the essence of democracy is dissent, and 'the presence of two worlds in one'.Living out his scenario of the guest who destroys the host, by welcoming the religious terrorist, paranoid queen, veiled woman, papist diehard, or puritan fundamentalist into his play-world, Worldly Shakespeare concludes, the dramatist instead provides a pretext for our globalized communities in a time of Facebook and fatwa, as we also come to depend on the right to offend 'with our good will'.
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474411339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
In Worldly Shakespeare Richard Wilson proposes that the universalism proclaimed in the name of Shakespeare's playhouse was tempered by his own worldliness, the performative idea that runs through his plays, that if 'All the world's a stage', then 'all the men and women in it' are 'merely players'. Situating this playacting in the context of current concerns about the difference between globalization and mondialisation, the book considers how this drama offers itself as a model for a planet governed not according to universal toleration, but the right to offend: 'But with good will'. For when he asks us to think we 'have but slumbered' throughout his offensive plays, Wilson suggests, Shakespeare is presenting a drama without catharsis, which anticipates post-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Rancire and Slavoj A iA ek, who insist the essence of democracy is dissent, and 'the presence of two worlds in one'.Living out his scenario of the guest who destroys the host, by welcoming the religious terrorist, paranoid queen, veiled woman, papist diehard, or puritan fundamentalist into his play-world, Worldly Shakespeare concludes, the dramatist instead provides a pretext for our globalized communities in a time of Facebook and fatwa, as we also come to depend on the right to offend 'with our good will'.
Editing Shakespeare
Author: Peter Holland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521868386
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
Published with academic researchers and graduate students in mind, this volume of the 'Shakespeare Survey' presents a number of contributions on the theme of editing Shakespeare's works.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521868386
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
Published with academic researchers and graduate students in mind, this volume of the 'Shakespeare Survey' presents a number of contributions on the theme of editing Shakespeare's works.
Shakespeare and Religious Change
Author: K. Graham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230240852
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
This balanced and innovative collection explores the relationship of Shakespeare's plays to the changing face of early modern religion, considering the connections between Shakespeare's theatre and the religious past, the religious identities of the present and the deep cultural changes that would shape the future of religion in the modern world.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230240852
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
This balanced and innovative collection explores the relationship of Shakespeare's plays to the changing face of early modern religion, considering the connections between Shakespeare's theatre and the religious past, the religious identities of the present and the deep cultural changes that would shape the future of religion in the modern world.
Shakespeare, the Earl, and the Jesuit
Author: John Klause
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838641378
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
The Jesuit's influence is pervasive, but most especially when the poet/playwright takes up in his own work issues of special concern to the earl in a crucial decade (1593-1604), after Southwell's death, through the religious and political crises faced by the young nobleman during that time."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838641378
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
The Jesuit's influence is pervasive, but most especially when the poet/playwright takes up in his own work issues of special concern to the earl in a crucial decade (1593-1604), after Southwell's death, through the religious and political crises faced by the young nobleman during that time."--BOOK JACKET.