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Renaissance Drama, an annual and interdisciplinary publication, is devoted to drama and performance as a central feature of Renaissance culture. The essays in each volume explore traditional canons of drama, the significance of performance (broadly construed) to early modern culture, and the impact of new forms of interpretation on the study of Renaissance plays, theater, and performance.
The Taming of the Shrew, Critical Essays provides comprehensive and up-to-date critical readings of the play. The editor has selected essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play.
Including twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies. Othello:Critical Essays explores issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.
This edition disengages Shakespeare's exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two 16th-century 'Shrew' plays as textually independent but theatrically interdependent.
An unusual study of the tradition of blackface in stage performance.
Shakespeare's Caliban examines The Tempest's "savage and deformed slave" as a fascinating but ambiguous literary creation with a remarkably diverse history. The authors, one a historian and the other a Shakespearean, explore the cultural background of Caliban's creation in 1611 and his disparate metamorphoses to the present time.
Letters, diaries, memoirs, conduct books and early feminist pamphlets: Essays in Defence of the Female Sex: Custom, Education, and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England is a two-part, text-based volume on the pivotal figures and most distinctive, sometimes contradictory, aspects of the querelle des femmes in Stuart England. Background information is given through male and especially female-authored sources, while the close analysis of [Hanna Woolley]’s, Bathsua Makin’s, Marry Astell’s, Judith Drake’s and Eugenia’s most renowned tracts sheds light on women’s difficult path towards emancipation. Addressed to both specialist and non-specialist readers, Essays in Defence of the Female Sex will also explain why–and to what extent–early feminist pamphleteering combined theory with practice, tradition with innovation, reality with utopia.
Featuring twenty one newly-commissioned essays, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion demonstrates how today's globalization is the result of a complex and lengthy historical process that had its roots in England's mercantile and cross-cultural interactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An innovative collection that interrogates the global paradigm of our period and offers a new history of globalization by exploring its influences on English culture and literature of the early modern period. Moves beyond traditional notions of Renaissance history mainly as a revival of antiquity and presents a new perspective on England's ...
Shakespeare's Othello has exercised a powerful fascination over audiences for centuries with its portrayal of destructive jealousy. This study is a major exercise in the historicisation of Othello in which the author examines contemporary writings and demonstrates how they were embedded in the text of Othello: discourse about conflict between Turk and Venetian treatises on the professionalisation of England's military forces, representations of Africans and blackamoors, and narratives depicting jealous husbands. The second section traces Othello's history in England and the United States from the Restoration to the late 1980s, using illustrations where appropriate. Each chapter highlights a specific historical period, actor or production to demonstrate how and why elements from Shakespeare's text were emphasised or repressed. Othello is revealed as a significant shaper of cultural meaning.
This book explores the gender politics of the reign of Mary I of England from her coronation to her funeral and examines the ways in which the queen and her supporters used language, royal ceremonies, and images to bolster her right to rule and define her image as queen.