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Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays—plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars—in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.
Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.
The figure of the puritan has long been conceived as dour and repressive in character, an image which has been central to ways of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history and literature. Kristen Poole's original study challenges this perception arguing that, contrary to current critical understanding, radical reformers were most often portrayed in literature of the period as deviant, licentious and transgressive. Through extensive analysis of early modern pamphlets, sermons, poetry and plays, the fictional puritan emerges as a grotesque and carnivalesque figure; puritans are extensively depicted as gluttonous, sexually promiscuous, monstrously procreating, and even as worshipping naked. By recovering this lost alternative satirical image, Poole sheds new light on the role played by anti-puritan rhetoric. Her book contends that such representations served an important social role, providing an imaginative framework for discussing familial, communal and political transformations that resulted from the Reformation.
Examining the impact of the English and European Reformations on social interaction and community harmony, this volume simultaneously highlights the tension and degree of accommodation amongst ordinary people when faced with religious and social upheaval. Building on previous literature which has characterised the progress of the Reformation as 'slow' and 'piecemeal', this volume furthers our understanding of the process of negotiation at the most fundamental social and political levels - in the family, the household, and the parish. The essays further research in the field of religious toleration and social interaction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in both Britain an...
Each of the figures examined in this study”John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Lead”is concerned with the ways in which God can be approached or experienced. Michael Martin analyzes the ways in which the encounter with God is figured among these early modern writers who inhabit the shared cultural space of poets and preachers, mystics and scientists. The three main themes that inform this study are Cura animarum, the care of souls, and the diminished role of spiritual direction in post-Reformation religious life; the rise of scientific rationality; and the struggle against the disappearance of the Holy. Arising from the methods and commitments of ph...
Written by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, they reexamine the categories which have shaped recent studies of early modern culture and literature, such as what constitutes the category of author or reader, what demarcates a particular literary form, and how its discursive shape might influence, and in turn be influenced by, contemporary political practices."--BOOK JACKET.
This cutting-edge book explores Shakespeare’s negotiation of Reformation controversy about theories of salvation. While twentieth century literary criticism tended to regard Shakespeare as a harbinger of secularism, the so-called “turn to religion” in early modern studies has given renewed attention to the religious elements in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, there remains an aura of uncertainty regarding some of the doctrinal and liturgical specificities of the period. This historical gap is especially felt with respect to theories of salvation, or soteriology. Such ambiguity, however, calls for further inquiry into historical theology. The author explores how the la...
"Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment argues that enchantment constitutes a key emotional and intellectual dimension of Shakespeare's comedies. It thus makes a new claim about the rejuvenating value of comedy for individuals and society. Shakespeare's comedies orchestrate ongoing encounters between the rational and the mysterious, between doubt and fascination, with feelings moved by elements of enchantment that also seem a little ridiculous. In such a drama, lines of causality become complex, and even satisfying endings leave certain matters incomplete and contingent--openings for scrutiny and thought. In addressing enchantment, the book takes exception to the modernist vision of a det...
Ordálias da Interpretação analisa ordálias medievais, a leitura de dados no polígrafo e alguns métodos de tortura, ao mesmo tempo que lê textos como Hamlet e Macbeth. Este livro descreve a ambição por uma pedra de toque que demonstre a veracidade, ou autenticidade, de certas entidades. De notar que pedra-de-toque – basanos (Βάσαυος) – era um termo usado para denominar a pedra com que se testava em contextos mercantis a qualidade do ouro, mas que designava igualmente a ideia de teste, tortura e torturador. Para os intérpretes mencionados neste livro, a pedra de toque, que pode ser um objecto, uma pessoa ou um teste, teria a capacidade de nos auxiliar a distinguir amigos d...
This book explores the rich range of meanings that Shakespeare finds in the natural world, enabling new readings of his works.