Medieval Shakespeare

Author : Martha W. Driver,Sid Ray
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2014-01-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780786491650

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Shakespeare and the Middle Ages by Martha W. Driver,Sid Ray Pdf

Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.

Author : Ruth Morse,Helen Cooper,Peter Holland
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2013-02-07
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781107016279

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Medieval Shakespeare by Ruth Morse,Helen Cooper,Peter Holland Pdf

This book gives readers the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare from the perspectives of the late-medieval European traditions that surrounded him.

Author : Kurt A. Schreyer
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2014-08-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780801455094

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Shakespeare's Medieval Craft by Kurt A. Schreyer Pdf

In Shakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare’s connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city’s cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects—as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors—to the Shakespearean stage.As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare’s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare’s stage—including the ass’s head of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth—were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.

Author : Ruth Morse,Helen Cooper,Peter Holland
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2013-02-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107310902

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Medieval Shakespeare by Ruth Morse,Helen Cooper,Peter Holland Pdf

For many, Shakespeare represents the advent of modernity. It is easy to forget that he was in fact a writer deeply embedded in the Middle Ages, who inherited many of his shaping ideas and assumptions from the medieval past. This collection brings together essays by internationally renowned scholars of medieval and early modern literature, the history of the book and theatre history to present new perspectives on Shakespeare and his medieval heritage. Separated into four parts, the collection explores Shakespeare and his work in the context of the Middle Ages, medieval books and language, the British past, and medieval conceptions of drama and theatricality, together showing Shakespeare's work as rooted in late medieval history and culture. Insisting upon Shakespeare's complexity and medieval multiplicity, Medieval Shakespeare gives readers the opportunity to appreciate both Shakespeare and his period within the traditions that fostered and surrounded him.

Author : Helen Cooper
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2014-09-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781408138991

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Shakespeare and the Medieval World by Helen Cooper Pdf

Helen Cooper's unique study examines how continuations of medieval culture into the early modern period, forged Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and poet. Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

Author : Helen Cooper
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2014-09-26
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781408138984

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Shakespeare and the Medieval World by Helen Cooper Pdf

Helen Cooper's unique study examines how continuations of medieval culture into the early modern period, forged Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and poet. Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

Author : Alfred Thomas
Publisher : Springer
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2018-06-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783319902180

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Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages by Alfred Thomas Pdf

Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Author : J. Paul McRoberts
Publisher : Scholarly Title
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 1985
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015012193085

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Shakespeare and the Medieval Tradition by J. Paul McRoberts Pdf

Author : Curtis Perry,John Watkins
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2009-05-07
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780199558179

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Shakespeare and the Middle Ages by Curtis Perry,John Watkins Pdf

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them with the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern world: almost all of the histories depict events during the Hundred Years War, and King John glances even further back to the thirteenth-century Angevins; several of the comedies, tragedies, and romances rest on medieval sources; and there are important medieval antecedents for some of the poetic modes in which he worked as well. Several of the essays reread Shakespeare by recovering aspects of his works that are derived from medieval traditions and whose significance has been obscured by the desire to read Shakespeare as the origin of the modern. These essays, taken cumulatively, challenge the idea of any decisive break between the medieval period and early modernity by demonstrating continuities of form and imagination that clearly bridge the gap. Other essays explore the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries constructed or imagined relationships between past and present. Attending to the way these writers thought about their relationship to the past makes it possible, in turn, to read against the grain of our own teleological investment in the idea of early modernity. A third group of essays reads texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as documents participating in social-cultural transformation from within. This means attending to the way they themselves grapples with the problem of change, attempting to respond to new conditions and pressures while holding onto customary habits of thought and imagination. Taken together, the essays in this volume revisit the very idea of transition in a refreshingly non-teleological way.

Author : Alex Davis
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2020-02-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192592132

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Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare by Alex Davis Pdf

Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice of the king's forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century noblewoman who commissions copies upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of sin bequeathed to mankind by our first parents, Adam and Eve. This book explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a 'society of heirs', in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose, and drama—in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser's Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works—we encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Moving between the late medieval and early modern periods, Imagining Inheritance examines this body of writing in order to argue that an exploration of the ways in which premodern inheritance was imagined can make legible the deep structures of power that modernity wants to forget.

Author : Kurt A. Schreyer
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2014-07-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780801455100

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Shakespeare's Medieval Craft by Kurt A. Schreyer Pdf

In Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare’s connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city’s cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects—as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors—to the Shakespearean stage. As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare’s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare’s stage—including the ass’s head of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth—were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.

Author : Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2019-09-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781501513091

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Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser by Jennifer C. Vaught Pdf

Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare’s drama and Spenser’s allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero’s art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Complaints.

Author : Manuel Augusto Antão
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 522 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2016-09-08
Category : Reference
ISBN : 9781365369926

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Shakespeare and I - Mirroring All Façades of Reality by Manuel Augusto Antão Pdf

In case there's anyone out there that has been reading the things I've been writing on my blogs, probably noticed that one of my "projects" for 2014, 2015 (and now 2016) was to read through all of Shakespeare's Works. Unfortunately, in 2014 I wasn't able to start this project (I read some Shakespeare stuff, but no plays). 2015 was where things really started shapping up Shakespeare-wise. But things were looking even better for 2016. On top of that, 2016 commemorated 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare and this special anniversary year was a truly unique opportunity to complete my quest of reading the rest of his entire body of work.

Author : Hugh Macrae Richmond
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 590 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0826477763

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Shakespeare's Theatre by Hugh Macrae Richmond Pdf

Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins>

Author : Darren Dyck
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2023-03-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781666738360

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Will & Love by Darren Dyck Pdf

Will & Love examines four of Shakespeare’s love plays (Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and Antony and Cleopatra) in light of the Augustinian psychology at the heart of the theological romance tradition. This tradition, which Shakespeare inherits from medieval theologian-poets such as Boethius, Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, issues from the idea, initially expressed by Augustine in his Confessions, that love functions as volitional weight, as a kind of magnetism or almost-gravitational force—that it moves the lover in mysterious ways yet without diminishing his or her agency. Will & Love highlights Shakespeare’s conception of love in terms of motion and explores the metaphysical, ethical, psychological, and dramatic implications of his doing so.