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In Words and Deeds
Departing from earlier studies which regarded incest as a literary topos or dramatic metaphor foregrounding political, social, or legal issues, Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy argues that the presence of incest on the Renaissance stage is a strategy for the enactment of the spectator’s tragic experience. Incest is explored neither as a sin nor as a crime, but as an “unspeakable” experience filtered through dramatic words and deeds. The incitement of desire, visual pleasure, and unconscious fantasy, as well as traumatic rejection, pain, and horror, are all aspects of this paradoxical and uncanny experience. Aristotelian theory of tragedy, Freudian...
Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama
In Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama, Bruce Boehrer provides the first general history of the Shakespearean stage to focus primarily on ecological issues. Early modern English drama was conditioned by the environmental events of the cities and landscapes within which it developed. Boehrer introduces Jacobean London as the first modern European metropolis in an England beset by problems of overpopulation; depletion of resources and species; land, water and air pollution; disease and other health-related issues; and associated changes in social behavior and cultural output. In six chapters he discusses the work of the most productive and influential playwrights of the day: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher, Dekker and Heywood, exploring the strategies by which they made sense of radical ecological change in their drama. In the process, Boehrer sketches out these playwrights' differing responses to environmental issues and traces their legacy for later literary formulations of green consciousness.
Animal Characters
During the Renaissance, horses—long considered the privileged, even sentient companions of knights-errant—gradually lost their special place on the field of battle and, with it, their distinctive status in the world of chivalric heroism. Parrots, once the miraculous, articulate companions of popes and emperors, declined into figures of mindless mimicry. Cats, which were tortured by Catholics in the Middle Ages, were tortured in the Reformation as part of the Protestant attack on Catholicism. And sheep, the model for Agnus Dei imagery, underwent transformations at once legal, material, and spiritual as a result of their changing role in Europe's growing manufacturing and trade economies. ...
Shakespeare Among the Animals
Shakespeare Among the Animals examines the role of animal-metaphor in the Shakespeare stage, particularly as such metaphor serves to underwrite various forms of social difference. Working through texts such as Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream , Jonson's Volpone , and Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside , different chapters of the study focus upon the allegedly natural character of femininity, masculinity, and ethnicity, while a fourth chapter considers the nature of the natural world itself as it appears on the Renaissance stage. Addressing each of these topics in turn, Shakespeare Among the Animals explores the notions of cultural order that underlie early modern conceptions of the natural world, and the ideas of nature implicit in early modern social practice.
Animals, Animality, and Literature
Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.
Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England
In Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England, Bruce Thomas Boehrer argues that a preoccupation with incest is built not the dominant social and cultural concerns of early modern England. Proceeding from a study of Henry III's divorce and succession legislation, through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, this work examines the interrelation between family politics and literary expression in and around the English royal court.
Parrot Culture
After completing his conquest of the Persian empire, Alexander the Great maneuvered his army across the Hindu Kush and into India. During his two years there, he traveled from dry frigid mountains to humid tropical lowlands and then back across one of the most punishing deserts on the planet. He fought a series of desperate battles against strange foes mounted on war-elephants, suffering wounds that nearly killed him. And when he eventually turned homeward, he brought with him specimens of a rare, magical species, a bird that could speak with a human voice. Introduced to Europe by Alexander, parrots were quickly embraced by Western culture as exotic and astonishing, full of marvelous powers,...
The Spanish Tragedy
The first fully-fledged example of a revenge tragedy, the genrethat became so influential in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, TheSpanish Tragedy (1589) occupies a very special place in the history ofEnglish Renaissance drama. Hieronimo, Knight-Marshal of Spain duringits war with Portugal, fails to obtain justice when his son is murderedfor courting Bel-Imperia, the Duke of Castile's daughter, and decidesto take justice into his own hands… This new student edition has been freshly revised by ProfessorAndrew Gurr to incorporate the latest stage history and criticalinterpretations of the play. It also appends the scenes that were addedin 1602, discusses Elizabethan attitudes to revenge, the Senecanfeatures of the play and the significance of the Anglo-Spanish conflictin the 1580s.
Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567-1667
Laurie Ellinghausen here analyzes how the concept of labor as a calling, which was assisted by early modern experiments in democracy, print, and Protestant religion, had a lasting effect on the history of authorship as a profession. Among the authors discussed are Ben Jonson; the maidservant and poet Isabella Whitney; the journalist and satirist Thomas Nashe; the boatman John Taylor "The Water Poet"; and the Puritan radical George Wither.
A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies
Provides a detailed map of contemporary critical theory in Renaissance and Early Modern English literary studies beyond Shakespeare A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is a groundbreaking guide to the contemporary engagement with critical theory within the larger disciplinary area of Renaissance and Early Modern studies. Comprising commissioned contributions from leading international scholars, it provides an overview of literary theory, beyond Shakespeare, focusing on most major figures, as well as some lesser-known writers of the period. This book represents an important first step in bridging the divide between the abundance of titles which explore applications of theory in...
