Regarded by many as the equal of Shakespeare in poetic imagination and expression, Milton was also a prolific writer of prose, applying his potent genius to major issues of domestic, religious and pol
Shakespeare's 'Whores' studies each use of the word 'whore' in Shakespeare's canon, focusing especially on the positive personal and social effects of female sexuality, as represented in several major
Henry VIII remains one of the most fascinating, notorious and recognizable monarchs in English history. In the five centuries since his accession to the throne, his iconic status has been shaped by different media. From Shakespeare to The Tudors, this book reassesses treatments of Henry VIII in literature, politics, and culture during the period spanned by the king's own reign (1509–47) and the twenty-first century. Historians and literary scholars investigate how representations of the king provoked varied responses from influential writers, artists, and political figures in the decades and centuries following his death. Individual chapters consider interrelated responses to Henry's character and policies during his lifetime; his literary and political afterlife; the king's impact on art and popular culture; and King Henry's debated place in historiography, from the Tudor period to the present.
Heather James examines the ways in which Shakespeare handles the inheritance and transmission of the Troy legend. She argues that Shakespeare's use of Virgil, Ovid and other classical sources demonstrates the appropriation of classical authority in the interests of developing a national myth, and goes on to distinguish Shakespeare's deployment of the myth from 'official' Tudor and Stuart ideology. James traces Shakespeare's reworking of the myth in Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline and The Tempest, and shows how the legend of Troy in Queen Elizabeth's day differed from that in the time of King James. The larger issue the book confronts is the directly political one of the way in which Shakespeare's textual appropriations participate in the larger cultural project of finding historical legitimation for a realm that was asserting its status as an empire.
Henry VIII remains one of the most fascinating, notorious and recognizable monarchs in English history. In the five centuries since his accession to the throne, his iconic status has been shaped by different media. From Shakespeare to The Tudors, this book reassesses treatments of Henry VIII in literature, politics, and culture during the period spanned by the king's own reign (1509–47) and the twenty-first century. Historians and literary scholars investigate how representations of the king provoked varied responses from influential writers, artists, and political figures in the decades and centuries following his death. Individual chapters consider interrelated responses to Henry's character and policies during his lifetime; his literary and political afterlife; the king's impact on art and popular culture; and King Henry's debated place in historiography, from the Tudor period to the present.
Mapping has become a key term in current critical discourse, describing a particular cognitive mode of gaining control over the world, of synthesising cultural and geographical information, and of successfully navigating both physical and mental space. In this 2001 collection, an international team of renaissance scholars analyses the material practice behind this semiotic concept. By examining map-driven changes in gender identities, body conception, military practices, political structures, national imaginings and imperial aspirations, the essays in this volume expose the multi-layered investments of historical 'paper landscapes' in the politics of space. Ranging widely across visual and textual artifacts implicated in the culture of mapping, from the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson, to representations of body, city, nation and empire, Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space argues for a thorough re-evaluation of the impact of cartography on the shaping
Shifting our focus from author to publisher and from first performance to first edition, Zachary Lesser offers a vantage point on the drama of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and their contemporaries. Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication reimagines the reception and meaning of plays by reading them through the eyes of their earliest publishers. Since success in the book trade required specialization, locating a play within its publisher's output allows us to see how the publisher read it and speculated that customers would read it. Their readings often differ radically from our own and so revise our views of the drama's engagement with early modern culture. By reading the 1633 Jew of Malta as a part of Nicholas Vavasour's Laudian specialty, for example, or the 1622 Othello in the context of Thomas Walkley's trade in parliamentary news, Lesser's study reveals the politics of these publications - for early modern readers and for us.
This is the first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the age of Shakespeare. The Mirror is here analysed by major scholars, who discuss its meaning and significance, and assess the extent of its influence as a series of tragic stories showing powerful princes and governors brought low by fate and enemy action. Scholars debate the challenging and radical nature of the Mirror's politics, its significance as a work of material culture, its relationship to oral culture as print was becoming ever more important, and the complicated evolution of its diverse texts. Other chapters discuss the importance of the book as the first major work that represented Roman history for a literary audience, the sly humour contained in the tragedies and their influence on major writers such as Spenser and Shakespeare.
Shifting our focus from author to publisher and from first performance to first edition, Zachary Lesser offers a new vantage point on the drama of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and their contemporari
Shakespeare's rise to prominence was by no means inevitable. While he was popular in his lifetime, the number of new editions and revivals of his plays declined over the following decades. Emma Depledge uses the methodologies of book and theatre history to provide a re-assessment of the reputation and dissemination of Shakespeare during the Interregnum and Restoration. She demonstrates the crucial role of the Exclusion Crisis (1678–1682), a political crisis over the royal succession, as a foundational moment in Shakespeare's canonisation. The period saw a sudden surge of theatrical alterations and a significantly increased rate of new editions and stage revivals. In the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, Shakespeare's plays were made available on a scale not witnessed since the early seventeenth century, thus reversing what might otherwise have been a permanent disappearance of his drama from canonical familiarity and firmly establishing Shakespeare's work in the national cultural imaginati
This is the first book to consider the whole subject of Chekhov's impact on the British stage. Recently Chekhov's plays have come to occupy a place in the British classical repertoire second only to Shakespeare. The British, American and Russian authors of these essays examine this phenomenon both historically and synchronically. First they discuss why Chekhov's plays were so slow to find an audience in Britain, what the early productions were really like, and how Bernard Shaw, Peggy Ashcroft, the Moscow Art Theatre and politics influenced the British style of Chekhov. They then address the often controversial issues of directing, acting, designing and translating Chekhov in Britain today. The volume concludes with a selective chronology of British productions of Chekhov's plays and will be of interest to students and scholars of the theatre, as well as theatre-goers, theatre-practitioners and Russianists.
Approaches Shakespeare's last play from the directions of sources and analogues in classical literature and mythology, colonial and dynastic politics, performance and performance history, critical rea
Cupid became a popular figure in the literary and visual culture of post-Reformation England. He served to articulate and debate the new Protestant theory of desire, inspiring a dark version of love tragedy in which Cupid kills. But he was also implicated in other controversies, as the object of idolatrous, Catholic worship and as an adversary to female rule: Elizabeth I's encounters with Cupid were a crucial feature of her image-construction and changed subtly throughout her reign. Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.
The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of Coriolanus, edited by Lee Bliss, provides a thorough reconsideration of what was probably Shakespeare's last tragedy. In the introduction, Bliss situates the play within its contemporary social and political contexts and pays particular attention to Shakespeare's manipulation of his primary source in Plutarch's Lives. The edition is alert to the play's theatrical potential, while the stage history also attends to the politics of performance from the 1680s onwards, including European productions following the Second World War. A new introductory section by Bridget Escolme accounts for recent theatrical productions as well as scholarly criticism of the last de
Restoration London's leading actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton has not been the subject of a biography since 1891. He worked with all the best-known playwrights of his age and with the first generation of English actresses; he was intimately involved in the theatre's responses to politics, and became a friend of leading literary men such as Pope and Steele. His innovations in scenery and company management, and his association with the dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare, helped to change the culture of English theatre. David Roberts's entertaining study unearths new documents and draws fresh conclusions about this major but shadowy figure. It contextualizes key performances and examines Betterton's relationship to patrons, colleagues and family, as well as to significant historical moments and artefacts. The most substantial study available of any seventeenth-century actor, Thomas Betterton gives one of England's greatest performing artists his due on the tercentenary of his
Cupid became a popular figure in the literary and visual culture of post-Reformation England. He served to articulate and debate the new Protestant theory of desire, inspiring a dark version of love tragedy in which Cupid kills. But he was also implicated in other controversies, as the object of idolatrous, Catholic worship and as an adversary to female rule: Elizabeth I's encounters with Cupid were a crucial feature of her image-construction and changed subtly throughout her reign. Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.
In this book, David Mann examines the influence of the Elizabethan cross-dressed tradition on the performance and conception of Shakespeare's female roles through an analysis of all 205 extant plays written for the adult theatre. The study provides both an historical context, showing how performance practice developed in the era before Shakespeare, and a comparative one, in revealing how dramatists in general treated their female characters and the influence their characterisation had upon Shakespeare's writing. The book challenges many views of the sexual ethos of Elizabethan theatre, offering instead a picture of Shakespeare which pays less attention to his supposed gender politics and more to his ability to exploit the cross-dressed convention as a dramatic medium. By challenging the gay and polemical feminist accounts that currently dominate the treatment of Elizabethan cross-dressing, the book restores its importance as a mainstream performance topic for academics and students.
The reign of James I (1603-25) has long been overshadowed by the prior glory of Elizabeth and the later outbreak of the Civil War. Yet how, without understanding the Jacobean court, are we to understand the world of Jonson, Donne and the late Shakespeare, divine right theory, court scandal and reform, appeals to the ancient constitution and reason of state, arguments from necessity and parliamentary precedent, chivalric nostalgia and classicism, mannerist excess and baroque grandeur? In this volume an international group of specialists in history literature and political theory set about reconstructing the mental world of the Jacobean court and challenging older orthodoxies on Jacobean politics, ideology, religion and culture. While the volume marks fresh departures in the study of the Jacobean court, it makes no attempt to offer a comprehensive study of the era. Rather, it presents chapters of original research, strongly interpretive in character, and sometimes in disagreement. There
The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of Coriolanus, edited by Lee Bliss, provides a thorough reconsideration of what was probably Shakespeare's last tragedy. In the introduction, Bliss situates the play within its contemporary social and political contexts and pays particular attention to Shakespeare's manipulation of his primary source in Plutarch's Lives. The edition is alert to the play's theatrical potential, while the stage history also attends to the politics of performance from the 1680s onwards, including European productions following the Second World War. A new introductory section by Bridget Escolme accounts for recent theatrical productions as well as scholarly criticism of the last de
