The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson

The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson PDF Author: Mary Ellen Lamb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113444110X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Breaking new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below, this book draws on theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier and John Fiske to synthesize work from disparate fields and present new readings of well-known literary works. Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb investigates the social narratives of several social groups – an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. She states that under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social fractions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves from each other – particularly from lower status groups. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, she explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.

The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson

The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson PDF Author: Mary Ellen Lamb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113444110X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Breaking new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below, this book draws on theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier and John Fiske to synthesize work from disparate fields and present new readings of well-known literary works. Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb investigates the social narratives of several social groups – an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. She states that under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social fractions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves from each other – particularly from lower status groups. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, she explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.

Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture

Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture PDF Author: Natália Pikli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000431630
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which the early modern hobby-horse featured in different productions of popular culture between the 1580s and 1630s. Natália Pikli approaches this study with a thorough and interdisciplinary examination of hobby-horse references, with commentary on the polysemous uses of the word, offers an informative background to reconsider well-known texts by Shakespeare and others, and provides an overview on the workings of cultural memory regarding popular culture in early modern England. The book will appeal to those with interest in early modern drama and theatre, dramaturgy, popular culture, cultural memory, and iconography.

The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare

The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare PDF Author: Margreta De Grazia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886325
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Twenty-one essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to the literary, historical, cultural and performative aspects of Shakespeare works.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry PDF Author: Jonathan F. S. Post
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199607745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 775

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry provides the widest coverage yet of Shakespeare's poetry and its afterlife in English and other languages.

Error in Shakespeare

Error in Shakespeare PDF Author: Alice Leonard
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030351807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The traditional view of Shakespeare’s mastery of the English language is alive and well today. This is an effect of the eighteenth-century canonisation of his works, and subsequently Shakespeare has come to be perceived as the owner of the vernacular. These entrenched attitudes prevent us from seeing the actual substance of the text, and the various types of error that it contains and even constitute it. This book argues that we need to attend to error to interpret Shakespeare’s disputed material text, political-dramatic interventions and famous literariness. The consequences of ignoring error are especially significant in the study of Shakespeare, as he mobilises the rebellious, marginal, and digressive potential of error in the creation of literary drama.

Bodies, Speech, and Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England

Bodies, Speech, and Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England PDF Author: Sara D. Luttfring
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317534468
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This volume examines early modern representations of women’s reproductive knowledge through new readings of plays, monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, court records, histories, and more, which are often interpreted as depicting female reproductive bodies as passive, silenced objects of male control and critique. Luttfring argues instead that these texts represent women exercising epistemological control over reproduction through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance into what Luttfring calls 'bodily narratives.' The power of these bodily narratives extends beyond knowledge of individual bodies to include the ways that women’s stories about reproduction shape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and kings. In the popular print and theater of early modern England, women’s bodies, women’s speech, and in particular women’s speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. This book joins growing critical discussion of how female reproductive bodies were used to represent socio-political concerns and will be of interest to students and scholars working in early modern literature and culture, women’s history, and the history of medicine.

Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama

Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama PDF Author: Ariane M. Balizet
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317961951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In this volume, the author argues that blood was, crucially, a means by which dramatists negotiated shifting contours of domesticity in 16th and 17th century England. Early modern English drama vividly addressed contemporary debates over an expanding idea of "the domestic," which encompassed the domus as well as sex, parenthood, household order, the relationship between home and state, and the connections between family honor and national identity. The author contends that the domestic ideology expressed by theatrical depictions of marriage and household order is one built on the simultaneous familiarity and violence inherent to blood. The theatrical relation between blood and home is far more intricate than the idealized language of the familial bloodline; the home was itself a bloody place, with domestic bloodstains signifying a range of experiences including religious worship, sex, murder, birth, healing, and holy justice. Focusing on four bleeding figures—the Bleeding Bride, Bleeding Husband, Bleeding Child, and Bleeding Patient—the author argues that the household blood of the early modern stage not only expressed the violence and conflict occasioned by domestic ideology, but also established the home as a site that alternately reified and challenged patriarchal authority.

Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance

Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance PDF Author: Marsha S. Collins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317478851
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
From Theocritus’ Idylls to James Cameron’s Avatar, Arcadia remains an enduring presence in world culture and a persistent source of creative inspiration. Why does Arcadia still exercise such a powerful pull on the imagination? This book responds by arguing that in sixteenth-century Europe, a dramatic shift took place in imagining Arcadia. The traditional visions of Arcadia collided and fused with romance, the new experimental form of prose fiction, producing a hybrid, dynamic world of change and transformation. Emphasizing matters of fictional function and world-making over generic classification, Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance analyzes the role of romance as a catalyst in remaking Arcadia in five, canonical sixteenth-century texts: Sannazaro’s Arcadia; Montemayor’s La Diana; Cervantes’ La Galatea; Sidney’s Arcadia; and Lope de Vega’s Arcadia. Collins’ analyses of the re-imagined Arcadia in these works elucidate the interplay between timely incursions into the fictional world and the timelessness of art, highlighting issues of freedom, identity formation, subjectivity and self-fashioning, the intersection of public and private activity, and the fascination with mortality. This book addresses the under-representation of Spanish literature in Early Modern literary histories, especially regarding the rich Spanish contribution to the pastoral and to idealizing fiction in the West. Companion chapters on Cervantes and Sidney add to the growing field of Anglo-Spanish comparative literary studies, while the book’s comparative and transnational approach extends discussion of the pastoral beyond the boundaries of national literary traditions. This book’s innovative approach to these fictional worlds sheds new light on Arcadia’s enduring presence in the collective imagination today.

Representing the Plague in Early Modern England

Representing the Plague in Early Modern England PDF Author: Rebecca Totaro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136963243
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life.

Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama

Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama PDF Author: Chris McMahon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415807751
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book considers Early Modern revenge plays from a political science perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of family and state institutions. Exploring whether or not the plays see revenge as justified, McMahon argues that they suggest the private family should become an informal state apparatus, and considers the pertinence of this conclusion for contemporary politics. By mapping transactions of capital in and around the plays, this book discovers new ways of looking at traditional problematics. Considerations of plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, and The Revenger's Tragedydepart from the tradition of moral criticism by taking an anthropological stance, mapping capital transactions to come to a better understanding of the plays in all their brilliance and complexity. McMahon responds to deconstructionist, Marxist, and feminist readings as he studies symbolic and material forms of capital in exemplary Early Modern plays.