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Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage
This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory. In a wide range of essays focused on early modern drama and the culture of theater, contributors explore how ideas of contagion not only inform representations of the senses (such as smell and touch) and emotions (such as disgust, pity, and shame) but also shape how people understood belief, narrative, and political agency. Epidemic thinking was not limited to medical inquiry or the narrow study of a particular disease. Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and other early modern writers understood that someone might be infected or transformed by the presence of others, through various kinds of exchange, or if exposed to certain ideas, practices, or environmental conditions. The discourse and concept of contagion provides a lens for understanding early modern theatrical performance, dramatic plots, and theater-going itself.
Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617
Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617 is the first book to consider railing plays and pamphlets as participating in a coherent literary movement that dominated much of the English literary landscape during the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. Author Prendergast considers how these crisis-ridden texts on religious, gender, and aesthetic controversies were encouraged and supported by the emergence of the professional theater and print pamphlets. She argues that railing texts by Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson, Jane Anger and others became sites for articulating anxious emotions-including fears about the stability of England after the death of Queen Elizabeth...
Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance
Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance seeks to address the representation of the humors from non-traditional, abstract, and materialist perspectives, considering the humorality of everyday objects, activities, and performance within the early modern period. To uncover how humoralism shapes textual, material, and aesthetic encounters for contemporary subjects in a broader sense than previous studies have pursued, the project brings together three principal areas of investigation: how the humoral body was evoked and embodied within the space of the early modern stage; how the materiality of an object can be understood as constructed within humoral discourse; and how individuals’ activities and pursuits can connote specific practices informed by humoralism. Across the book, contributors explore how diverse media and cultural practices are informed by humoralism. As a whole, the collection investigates alternative humoralities in order to illuminate both early modern works of art as well as the cultural moments of their production.
Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage
Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.
"Rapt in Secret Studies"
“Rapt in Secret Studies”: Emerging Shakespeares is a collection of new essays in Shakespeare Studies from a generation of scholars presently emerging out of Australia and New Zealand. These 18 essays respond in a myriad of ways to the challenge of Prospero’s phrase from The Tempest, in which he tells his daughter Miranda that in his life before the island he had been “rapt in secret studies”-to an early modern audience, these words were likely to mean much more than a predilection for the black arts, as modern audiences tend to hear in them. Each of the key words used by Prospero evoked a range of meanings in early modern times, to which the emerging scholars represented in this co...
Twelfth Night: A Critical Reader
Twelfth Night is the most mature and fully developed of Shakespeare's comedies and, as well as being one of his most popular plays, represents a crucial moment in the development of his art. Assembled by leading scholars, this guide provides a comprehensive survey of major issues in the contemporary study of the play. Throughout the book chapters explore such issues as the play's critical reception from John Manningham's account of one of its first performances to major current comentators like Stephen Greenblatt; the performance history of the play, from Shakespeare's day to the present and key themes in current scholarship, from issues of gender and sexuality to the study of comedy and song. Twelfth Night: A Critical Guide also includes a complete guide to resources available on the play - including critical editions, online resources and an annotated bibliography - and how they might be used to aid both the teaching and study of Shakespeare's enduring comedy.
Shakespeare and the Power of the Face
Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare’s England helps explain moments when Shakespeare’s language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare’s treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing in...
Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation
This edited book analyses how artists, authors, and cultural practitioners have responded to and represented episodes of epidemics/pandemics through history. Covering a broad range of notable epidemics/pandemics (black death, cholera, Influenza, AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19), the chapters examine the cultural representations of epidemics and pandemics in different contexts, periods, languages, media, and genres. Interdisciplinary in nature and drawing on perspectives from medicine, literature, medical anthropology, philosophy of medicine, and cultural theory, the book investigates and emphasizes the urgent need to reflect on past catastrophes caused by such outbreaks. By delving into cultural histo...
Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages
"The book argues that rediscovered ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on sixteenth-century England's dramatic landscape, not only in academic and aristocratic settings, but also at the heart of the developing commercial theaters."--Introduction, p. 2.
Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare's Theatre
This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in Shakespeare’s world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern ‘body-mind’ in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of Shakespeare’s theatre or on our histories of the early modern period, broadly speaking? This book provides a wide range of approaches to this challenge, covering histories of cognition, studies of early modern stage practices, textual ...
