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This collection of essays represents new scholarly work on John Webster’s great tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. The critical methodologies range from historical contexts to feminist readings of agency and identity, to social analyses of Jacobean culture. The play has rightly taken its place as one of the greatest of the early modern period, and the Duchess is now seen as one of the great tragic figures of the time—and along with Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, one of the most powerful representations of a strong female character in control of her own sexuality and her own destiny. The play also offers an unusual range of villainous characters, from the Duchess’s two brothers—the Machiavellian Cardinal and the deranged Ferdinand—to Bosola, who at first seems to be a conventional Vice-like villain. Bosola commits terrible acts in the play, and though he ultimately surrenders to his conscience and tries to do good, this transformation comes too late, and the final set of murders takes place in darkness—an apt symbol of the play’s disturbing moral universe.
This collection of provocative new essays, mainly by French scholars, on Shakespeare’s great tragedy, focuses on linguistic, aesthetic and philosophical issues with specific attention paid to the dimension of early modern desire, sexuality and gender relations. King Lear is here re-examined in the perspective of Lucrece, Montaigne, Renaissance medicine and anatomy, the grotesque, myth and imagery as well as negative theology. It is hoped that this will serve to update our approaches to this elusive, undecided play, neither Christian nor as completely nihilistic as some critics have argued, which nevertheless remains quite popular on French and English stages alike.
Presenting a broad spectrum of reflections on the subject of female transgression in early modern Britain, this volume proposes a richly productive dialogue between literary and historical approaches to the topic. The essays presented here cover a range of ’transgressive’ women: daughters, witches, prostitutes, thieves; mothers/wives/murderers; violence in NW England; violence in Scotland; single mothers; women as (sexual) partners in crime. Contributions illustrate the dynamic relation between fiction and fact that informs literary and socio-historical analysis alike, exploring female transgression as a process, not of crossing fixed boundaries, but of negotiating the epistemological space between representation and documentation.
The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has inspired interpretations in every genre and medium. This book offers perspectives on the ways in which practitioners have used Renaissance drama to address contemporary concerns and reach new audiences. It provides a resource for those interested in the creative reception of Renaissance drama.
This book examines three Shakespeare plays in which abusive banishment participates in a dialectics of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (King Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus). It draws on analyses by French philosophers (notably Deleuze and Foucault), so as to understand strategies of resistance when one is denied one's territory.
The early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world. By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, wounds and scars, this volume shows that early modern markers of skin and readers of marked skin did not think about different kinds of cutaneous signs as separate from each other. On the contrary, Euro...
By 1744, two separate editions of Shakespeare’s complete works have been published, but there is still a missing piece, a missing link...a missing play! Actress Peg Woffington is convinced that the role of a lifetime is contained within that mysterious play, “The History of Cardenio,” if only it can be found. Peg and her loyal steward, Ignatius Sancho, race across England from clue to clue, but they soon find that there are other players conspiring against them. Death, disguises, and intrigue combine in Jean Harambat’s Shakespearian-style comedy, painted with his trademark imaginative style. Harambat is also the author of Operation Copperhead and The Detection Club.
Études sur la pré-renaissance et la renaissance anglaises.
Matthew Williamson's book argues that the representation of hunger and appetite was central to political debate in early modern drama.
Riots in Literature addresses representations of crowd disorder as manifestations of popular politics, including colonial and postcolonial contexts. The terms used to describe disorder are themselves, of course, contested. Words like “mob,” “demonstration” and “protest,” not to mention “riot’ itself, denote a particular perspective based on an elitist taxonomy for dealing with social and cultural phenomena in society. Of primary concern is the way in which the text describes and designates crowd behaviour using the language of denigration, metaphors of the primitive and animalistic, brutal images, and silences, and where the mediation of the event is expressed in terms of the...