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Containing annotated extracts from key sources, this guide to William Shakespeare's Macbeth explores the heated debates that this play has sparked. Looking at issues, such as the representation of gender roles, political violence and the dramatisation of evil, this volume provides a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Shakespeare's text.
Focuses on Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The winter's tale. UkBU.
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This volume contains the edited proceedings from the 1990 symposium "Attending to Women in Early Modern England," which was sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies and the University of Maryland at College Park. Edited by Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F.
In early American society, one’s identity was determined in large part by gender. The ways in which men and women engaged with their communities were generally not equal: married women fell under the legal control of their husbands, who handled all negotiations with the outside world, as well as many domestic interactions. The death of a husband enabled women to transcend this strict gender divide. Yet, as a widow, a woman occupied a third, liminal gender in early America, performing an unusual mix of male and female roles in both public and private life. With shrewd analysis of widows’ wills as well as prescriptive literature, court appearances, newspaper advertisements, and letters, The Widows’ Might explores how widows were portrayed in early American culture, and how widows themselves responded to their unique role. Using a comparative approach, Vivian Bruce Conger deftly analyzes how widows in colonial Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Maryland navigated their domestic, legal, economic, and community roles in early American society.
For at least the first two centuries following its publication, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was among the most formative and beloved books England contributed to the Western tradition, second only to the English Bible in popularity and influence. In this important new study, Kathleen Swaim recognizes Bunyan as a major Puritan cultural figure and Pilgrim's Progress as a multilayered locus of cultural, historical, and theological, as well as literary, systems. Her work maps shifts of cultural and theological emphasis as Christian's focus on the Word and Protestant martyrdom in Part I (1678) gives way to Christiana's characteristic emphasis on good works and the material reality of the Chu...
What was it like to be a woman when England was ruled by a queen, but women had almost no legal power? When marriage cost women their property rights? When the ideal woman was rarely seen and never heard in public? In other words, what was it like to be a woman in England between 1525 and 1675? Suzanne Hull, in Women According to Men answers these questions and more, taking fascinating look at how women were described, and prescribed to act, by men during that time. Hull, the first woman ever appointed as a Principal Officer at the Huntington Library as well as the author of Chaste, Silent and Obedient, uses her years of experience researching 16th- and 17th-century texts to provide you with an authentic look at the state of women during the Elizabethan era. Through an examination of texts written during that time about and for women, Hull elucidates what the rules for women were then, as well as discussing health habits, household remedies, theories on conception, the care of children, the making of food, fashion and more.
Can there be a virtue in vengeance? Can revenge do ethical work? Can revenge be the obligation of women? This wide-ranging literary study looks at Shakespeare's women and finds bold answers to questions such as these. A surprising number of Shakespeare's female characters respond to moral outrages by expressing a strong desire for vengeance. This book's analysis of these characters and their circumstances offers incisive critical perceptions of feminine anger, ethics, and agency and challenges our assumptions about the role of gender in revenge. In this provocative book, Marguerite A. Tassi counters longstanding critical opinions on revenge: that it is the sole province of men in Western literature and culture, that it is a barbaric, morally depraved, irrational instinct, and that it is antithetical to justice. Countless examples have been mined from Shakespeare's dramas to reveal women's profound concerns with revenge and justice, honor and shame, crime and punishment. In placing the critical focus on avenging women, this book significantly redresses a gender imbalance in scholarly treatments of revenge, particularly in early modern literature.
Aemilia Lanyer was a Londoner of Jewish-Italian descent and the mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain. But in 1611 she did something extraordinary for a middle-class woman of the seventeenth century: she published a volume of original poems. Using standard genres to address distinctly feminine concerns, Lanyer's work is varied, subtle, provocative, and witty. Her religious poem "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum" repeatedly projects a female subject for a female reader and casts the Passion in terms of gender conflict. Lanyer also carried this concern with gender into the very structure of the poem; whereas a work of praise usually held up the superiority of its patrons, the good women in La...