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The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets uses Shakespeare's poetry as a case study for the mutually formative relationship between desire and recollection. Through a series of close readings that are both historically situated and informed by recent theory, it traces how the speaker of the poems strives for a more agential relationship to his own memory by treating recollection as a form of narrative. Drawing together insights from cognitive science, the early modern memory arts, and psychoanalysis, John S. Garrison connects the Sonnets to the larger Renaissance project of conceiving memory as a faculty to be developed and managed through self-discipline and rhetoric. In doing so, he...
None a Stranger There offers a collection of wide-ranging essays that explore the creation and understanding of English identity through the lens of early modern drama. Drawing together a rich array of disciplines--literary criticism, theater history, linguistics, book history, and performance studies--the scholars in this collection illuminate how diverse or competing notions of "Englishness" can be seen and studied in early modern English plays. They are an especially fertile site of study because they enabled collective performances in a variety of settings, such as public theaters, royal courts, and streets. They engaged with live audiences from a cross section of society. The contributo...
We no longer ascribe the term ’mermaid’ to those we deem sexually or economically threatening; we do not ubiquitously use the mermaid’s image in political propaganda or feature her within our houses of worship; perhaps most notably, we do not entertain the possibility of the mermaid’s existence. This, author Tara Pedersen argues, makes it difficult for contemporary scholars to consider the mermaid as a figure who wields much social significance. During the early modern period, however, this was not the case, and Pedersen illustrates the complicated category distinctions that the mermaid inhabits and challenges in 16th-and 17th-century England. Addressing epistemological questions abo...
How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the ’spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.
Hailey Bachrach reveals how Shakespeare used female characters in deliberate and consistent ways across his history plays. Illuminating these patterns, she helps us understand these characters not as incidental or marginal presences, but as a key lens through which to understand Shakespeare's process for transforming history into drama. Shakespeare uses female characters to draw deliberate attention to the blurry line between history and fiction onstage, bringing to life the constrained but complex position of women not only in the past itself, but as characters in depictions of said past. In Shakespeare's historical landscape, female characters represent the impossibility of fully recovering voices the record has excluded, and the empowering potential of standing outside history that Shakespeare can only envision by drawing upon the theatre's material conditions. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Choice is the defining issue of the twenty-first century. As the #MeToo movement extends its legal, social, and political reach around the world, the topic of consent has come under particular scrutiny. Shakespeare on Consent examines crises of consent on the early modern stage and argues that these dramatizations provide a framework for understanding the intersections of coercion, complicity, resistance, and agency. Beginning with the premise that consent serves as a lever of entitlement, Amanda Bailey introduces a Shakespeare well aware that liberal selfhood has never been universally available. Bailey brings Shakespeare’s work into conversation with the Penn State Sandusky scandal, the ...
Whilst Shakespearean drama provides eloquent calls to war, more often than not these are undercut or outweighed by compelling appeals to peaceful alternatives conveyed through narrative structure, dramatic context and poetic utterance. Placing Shakespeare's works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare's plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare's interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare's plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.
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.
Shakespeare on the Ecological Surface uses the concept of the ‘surface’ to examine the relationship between contemporary performance and ecocriticism. Each section looks, in turn, at the 'surfaces' of slick, smoke, sky, steam, soil, slime, snail, silk, skin and stage to build connections between ecocriticism, activism, critical theory, Shakespeare and performance. While the word ‘surface’ was never used in Shakespeare’s works, Liz Oakley-Brown shows how thinking about Shakespearean surfaces helps readers explore the politics of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. She also draws surprising parallels with our current political and ecological concerns. The book explores how Shakespeare uses ecological surfaces to help understand other types of surfaces in his plays and poems: characters’ public-facing selves; contact zones between characters and the natural world; surfaces upon which words are written; and physical surfaces upon which plays are staged. This book will be an illuminating read for anyone studying Shakespeare, early modern culture, ecocriticism, performance and activism.
Queer Milton is the first book-length study dedicated to anti-heteronormative approaches to the poetry and prose of John Milton. Organized into sections on “Eroticism and Form” and “Temporality and Affect,” essays in this volume read Milton’s works through radical queer interpretive frameworks that have elsewhere animated and enriched Renaissance Studies. Leveraging insights from recent queer work and related fields, contributions demonstrate diverse possible futures for Queer Milton Studies. At the same time, Queer Milton bears witness to the capacity for queer to arbitrate debates that have shaped, and indeed continue to shape, developments in the field of Milton Studies.