You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"Jay L. Halio is internationally distinguished as an editor of Shakespeare's plays and as a critic of Shakespeare in performance. This collection, with an international list of contributors, honors both those interests and explores their interconnectedness."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Theatre and empire looks at the genesis of British national identity in the reign of King James VI and I. While devolution is currently decentralising Britain, this book examines how the idea of a united kingdom was created in the first place. It does this by studying two things: the political language of the King's project to replace England, Scotland and Wales with a single kingdom of Great Britain; and cultural representations of empire on the public and private stages. The book argues that between 1603 and 1625 a group of playwrights celebrated a new national consciousness in works as diverse as Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Specifically Jacobean interdisciplinary studies are few compared with Elizabethan and Caroline works, but the book attempts to redress the balance by offering a fresh appraisal of James Stuart’s reign. Looking at both established and little-known plays and playwrights, Theatre and empire rewrites our understanding of the political and cultural context of the Jacobean stage.
Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. An afterword, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.
Contains revised essays from a July 1997 conference, investigating why, and to what extent, women have been excluded from rhetoric, and what contributions they have nevertheless made to it in the past, as well as what they are doing in the field today. Essays are arranged to show the various ways in which received wisdom has been challenged and the rhetorical tradition revised. Topics include Plato's women, the ongoing appeal of St. Catherine of Siena, Lady Mary Wroth's Urania and the rhetoric of female abuse, and feminist thoughts on rhetoric. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Shakespeare and Wales offers a 'Welsh correction' to a long-standing deficiency. It explores the place of Wales in Shakespeare's drama and in Shakespeare criticism, covering ground from the absorption of Wales into the Tudor state in 1536 to Shakespeare on the Welsh stage in the twenty-first century. Shakespeare's major Welsh characters, Fluellen and Glendower, feature prominently, but the Welsh dimension of the histories as a whole, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline also come in for examination. The volume also explores the place of Welsh-identified contemporaries of Shakespeare such as Thomas Churchyard and John Dee, and English writers with pronounced Welsh interests such as Spens...
In our own age, the engagement with death has been discretely narrowed into a brief process of formal commemoration and burial, but in Shakespeare's time it was ritualized into the very fabric of everyday life, where the reminders of death, the journey to the grave, and the moment of expiry were all central to the cultural engagement with mortality in post-Reformation England. Inevitably, this way of seeing the world impacted the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, not only in relation to the intellectual content of the drama but with regard to its visual impressions as well. Emblems of Mortality explores the relationship between Shakespeare's theatre and popular memento mori and funereal iconography of the Renaissance, combining cultural studies and historicism with semiotic analysis of period iconography. Through close reading of Elizabethan signs and sign systems with attention to historical context, the work seeks to demonstrate the quality and intention of some of Shakespeare's theatrical designs in a way that will appeal to scholars of drama and students of Shakespeare's work.
The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.
Shakespeare was not only aware of the socio-cultural fears and anxieties generated by the older woman’s body but with the characterization of his tragic ageing females, Shakespeare becomes the first literary giant to explore the physiological and psychosocial condition that we have come to know as ‘menopause’. Although ‘menopause’ was not defined as a medical, physiological or sociocultural event for the early moderns, this book argues that such a medical and cultural transition can, in fact, be identified by sub-textual clues distinguished by various embodied anxieties. It explores several ageing women of the Shakespearean tragedies as they transition through this liminal menopausal period. Theoretically underscored by humoral theory, the analysis is metonymically centered upon the womb as the seat of menopausal anxiety. These menopausal undercurrents, not only permeate the dramatic action of each play, but also emanate outward to reflect the medical, physiological, cultural, social, and religious concerns generated by the ageing woman of the early modern period at large.
Healy demonstrates how Renaissance alchemy shaped Shakespeare's bawdy but spiritual sonnets, transforming our understanding of Shakespeare's art and beliefs.
This work is a critical study of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, with a focus on Shakespeare's exploration of language in its destructive potentialities and its redemptive workings.