Author : Kilian Schindler
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 22,38 MB
Release : 2023-07-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1009226312
Kilian Schindler reveals how religious persecution in early modern England was a shaping force for drama and conceptions of theatricality.
Author : Kilian Schindler
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 21,25 MB
Release : 2023-07-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1009226320
Kilian Schindler examines how playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe represented religious dissimulation on stage and argues that debates about the legitimacy of dissembling one's faith were closely bound up with early modern conceptions of theatricality. Considering both Catholic and Protestant perspectives on religious dissimulation in the absence of full toleration, Schindler demonstrates its ubiquity and urgency in early modern culture. By reconstructing the ideological undercurrents that inform both religious dissimulation and theatricality as a form of dissimulation, this book makes a case for the centrality of dissimulation in the religious politics of early modern drama. Lucid and original, this study is an important contribution to the understanding of early modern religious and literary culture.
Author : Lieke Stelling
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 13,23 MB
Release : 2019-01-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1108757243
Few subjects of the English stage have proved more alluring and enduring than religious conversion. The emergence of the Elizabethan theatre marked a profound shift in the way in which conversion was presented. If medieval drama had encouraged conversion without reservation, early Elizabethan plays started to question it. Considering over forty canonical and lesser known works, this study argues that more so than any other medium, early modern drama engaged with the question of the possibility of undergoing a radical transformation in faith and presented the period's understanding of it as fundamentally unsettled. Offering the first cross-religious exploration of conversion in early modern English drama, and presenting a new reading of William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, Lieke Stelling reveals telling patterns in the stage's treatment of conversion and religious identity.
Author : Holly Crawford Pickett
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 46,52 MB
Release : 2024-03-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1512825654
In The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England, Holly Crawford Pickett reconceptualizes early modern religious identity by exploring the astonishing stories of serial converts: historical figures such as William Alabaster, Kenelm Digby, William Chillingworth, and Marc Antonio De Dominis, along with fictional ones, who changed their religious affiliations between Catholicism and Protestantism multiple times. Pickett argues that serial converts both reveal and helped revise early modern understandings of the self. Through investigation of the techniques that serial converts used to stage and justify their conversions, Pickett demonstrates the performative nature of the act of conversion itself, offering a counternarrative to the paradigm of sincere, private conversion that was on the rise in the tumultuous years following the Reformation. Drawing from archival investigation into the lives and works of serial converts and performance studies theory, this book shows how the genres and conventions associated with conversion shaped not only forms of communication but also the very experience of conversion. By juxtaposing plays about serial conversion—by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare—with spiritual autobiographies, Pickett highlights the shared task of convert and playwright: performing conversion for an audience. Serial converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of conversion.
Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 14,30 MB
Release : 2024-04-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0192689770
'What is honour? A word. What is in that word 'honour'? What is that 'honour'? Air.' A history play that combines a coming-of-age narrative with a tale of power, rebellion, friendship, and betrayal, Henry IV, Part I has been a perennial favourite from Shakespeare's time to the present. What has ensured its popularity is above all the towering figure of Falstaff, Shakespeare's greatest comic creation. The ebullient, unabashedly pleasure-seeking and brilliantly witty character has proved as irresistible for audiences as he was for his protégé, Prince Hal. This introduction discusses their relationship within the framework of the play's historical, cultural, and performative setting. At the same time, it explores the question of why the play has proved so enduringly attractive to audiences today. The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare's works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare's work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare's work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Author : Anne Enderwitz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 39,74 MB
Release : 2023-06-29
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0192866818
This book provides new insights into how theatre responded to changing economic practices and structures. It reviews discourses on household management and commerce to create a rich context for the discussion of socio-economic actions and transactions in Macbeth, Othello, and Timon of Athens, as well as in city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. By approaching discourses on economy and commerce as complementary, the book opens up a diverse field of socio-economic practices, including the gendered division of duties in the household, new modes of valuation, and evolving credit instruments. Theatre provides unique access to this field. In contrast to practical and policy-oriented discourses, it addresses socio-economic change and its vicissitudes in a spirit of experimentation, testing the ethical limits of socio-economic action and accustoming audiences to the demands of a changing socio-economic reality. Theatre thus offers a vital contribution to the prehistory of political economy. On the London stages, self-interest emerges as a key motive of socio-economic action, and theatre playfully explores its ambiguous status as a partly rational and partly excessive force that has a new ordering function but also creates social conflict. At the same time, by staging the contradictory demands of ethics and efficiency in economic decision-making, early modern plays offer access to a changing understanding of prudence that has a Machiavellian touch: by aligning with the pursuit of private interest, prudence sheds some of its ethical content and becomes foremost an instrumental faculty.
Author : Eva Johanna Holmberg
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 21,39 MB
Release : 2022-05-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3030972283
British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Islam.
Author : Margie Burns
Publisher : Vernon Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 37,18 MB
Release : 2025-01-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN :
Twelve research articles deal with aspects of religion in the plays of William Shakespeare, from early in the dramatist’s career to the end. Ordered by chronology, two chapters focus on history plays; three chapters focus on comedies and three on tragedies; one deals with "Troilus and Cressida," and three chapters deal with the late romances. The anthology does not cover all of Shakespeare’s plays and collaborations or the lyric poems. The collection is ecumenical and transnational. While the contributors all recognize that Shakespeare wrote in a Renaissance Christian universe, Christianity is not the only world religion dealt with. Approaches involve history and philosophy as well as theology, and individual perspectives vary. One thing the collection makes clear is that religion, in some sense, operates in every Shakespearean work, and its large spectrum ranges through plot and character from shallow to deep, self-interested to elevated, bloody to harmonious. Religion and religious differences were also part of the fabric and history of the playwright’s world, manifesting in the plays in situation, language, and iconography. From various perspectives, a common denominator is that the authors approach aspects of religion as one element in an informed analysis of the works.
Author : Patrick Cheney
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 15,39 MB
Release : 2004-07-15
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780521527347
The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe provides a full introduction to one of the great pioneers of both the Elizabethan stage and modern English poetry. It recalls that Marlowe was an inventor of the English history play (Edward II) and of Ovidian narrative verse (Hero and Leander), as well as being author of such masterpieces of tragedy and lyric as Doctor Faustus and 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love'. Sixteen leading scholars provide accessible and authoritative chapters on Marlowe's life, texts, style, politics, religion, and classicism. The volume also considers his literary and patronage relationships and his representations of sexuality and gender and of geography and identity; his presence in modern film and theatre; and finally his influence on subsequent writers. The Companion includes a chronology of Marlowe's life, a note on reference works, and a reading list for each chapter.
Author : Katherine Steele Brokaw
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 19,15 MB
Release : 2016-07-18
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1501705911
In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England’s long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people’s reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for. The theater represented the music of the church’s present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.
