In this updated edition, Wells (English literature, Roehampton University, London) does not advocate a particular or anachronistic political outlook to Shakespeare. Rather, he places the plays within
Shakespeare's Politics is an invaluable introduction to the political world of Shakespeare's plays. It includes passages from the plays together with extracts from contemporary historical and politica
Renaissance humanists believed that if you want to build a just society you must begin with the facts of human nature. This book argues that the idea of a universal human nature was as important to Shakespeare as it was to every other Renaissance writer. In doing so it questions the central principle of post-modern Shakespeare criticism. Postmodernists insist that the notion of defining a human essence was alien to Shakespeare and his contemporaries; as radical anti-essentialists, the Elizabethans were, in effect, postmodernists before their time. In challenging this claim Shakespeare's Humanism shows that for Shakespeare, as for every other humanist writer in this period, the key to all wise action was 'the knowledge of our selves and our human condition'.
Masculinity was a political issue in early modern England. Phrases such as 'courage-masculine' or 'manly virtue' took on a special meaning and signified commitment to the ideals of militant Protestantism. Diplomacy and compromise were disparaged as 'feminine'. Shakespeare on Masculinity is an original study of the way Shakespeare's plays engage with this ideal and a subject that provoked bitter public dispute. Robin Headlam Wells argues that Shakespeare took a sceptical view of the militant-Protestant cult of heroic masculinity. Following a series of portraits of the dangerously charismatic warrior-hero, Shakespeare turned at the end of his writing career to a different kind of leader. If the heroes of the martial tragedies evoke a Herculean ideal of manhood, The Tempest portrays a ruler who, Orpheus-like, uses the arts of civilization to bring peace to a divided world. Other plays receiving close readings include Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Coriolanus.
For lovers of music and poetry the legendary figure of Orpheus probably suggests a romantic ideal. But for the Renaissance he is essentially a political figure. Mythographers interpreted the Orpheus story as an allegory of the birth of civilization because they recognized in the arts in which Orpheus excelled an instrument of social control so powerful that with it you could, as one writer put it, 'winne Cities and whole Countries'. Dealing with plays, poems, songs and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the transforming power of music and poetry. Elizabethan Mythologies, first published in 1994, contains numerous illustrations from the period and will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance poetry, drama and music, and of the history of ideas.
Human Nature: Fact and Fiction brings together a collection of inspiring, thought-provoking and original perspectives on human nature by ten leading writers, scientists and academics. What do we mean
For nearly two decades, Renaissance literary scholarship has been dominated by various forms of postmodern criticism which claim to expose the simplistic methodology of `traditional' criticism and to
