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While over the past four hundred years numerous opinions have been
voiced as to Shakespeare's identity, these eleven essays widen the
scope of the investigation by regarding Shakespeare, his world, and
his works in their interaction with one another. Instead of
restricting the search for bits and pieces of evidence from his
works that seem to match what he may have experienced, these essays
focus on the contemporary milieu-political developments, social and
theater history, and cultural and religious pressures-as well as
the domestic conditions within Shakespeare's family that shaped his
personality and are featured in his works. The authors of these
essays, employing the tenets of critical theory and practice as
well as intuitive and informed insight, endeavor to look behind the
masks, thus challenging the reader to adjudicate among the
possible, the probable, the likely, and the unlikely. With the
exception of the editor's own piece on Hamlet, Shakespeare the Man:
New Decipherings presents previously unpublished essays, inviting
the reader to embark upon an intellectual adventure into the
fascinating terrain of Shakespeare's mind and art.
Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the
murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison
mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses
of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge
resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many
new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts
at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects
unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and
death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary
fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores
poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological
issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes
questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and
humans’ relationship to the environment. -- .
Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the
debate about the cultural work performed by representations of
magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in
which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of
national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its
recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic
can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is
staged and what the representational strategies and techniques
might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical
plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, The Merry Wives of
Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less
canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio,
The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late
Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two
groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in
which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or
accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational
strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well
as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal
the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary
debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect
transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of
all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of
magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation
applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic,
but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about
change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and
stereotypes.
The Lady's Trial, Ford's last play, encapsulates the final
development of his own unique theatrical aesthetic whilst looking
back to the drama of his youth, most notably Othello, whose story
is here rewritten. In Ford's version, the supposedly wronged
husband, the victorious general Auria, does not simply take the
word of his friend, the well-intentioned but overly suspicious
Aurelio, that his wife, Spinella, is unfaithful: instead he does
what Othello apparently never even thinks of doing, and conducts a
rational, public sifting of the apparent evidence, at the end of
which Spinella is triumphantly cleared. In combining this story of
public vindication with his distinctive dramatic style of delicate
reticence, Ford offers a powerful exploration of both the
capabilities and the limitations of language and its role in human
relationships. Newly available in paperback, the first scholarly
edition of this undeservedly neglected play situates it in its
dramatic and historical contexts and helps elucidate Ford's
understated, allusive style. -- .
Recurring to the governing idea of her 2005 study Shakespeare on
the Edge, Lisa Hopkins expands the parameters of her investigation
beyond England to include the Continent, and beyond Shakespeare to
include a number of dramatists ranging from Christopher Marlowe to
John Ford. Hopkins also expands her notion of liminality to explore
not only geographical borders, but also the intersection of the
material and the spiritual more generally, tracing the contours of
the edge which each inhabits. Making a journey of its own by
starting from the most literally liminal of physical structures,
walls, and ending with the wholly invisible and intangible, the
idea of the divine, this book plots the many and various ways in
which, for the Renaissance imagination, metaphysical overtones
accrued to the physically liminal.
This collection of new essays about the earl of Essex, one of the
most important figures of the Elizabethan court, resituates his
life and career within the richly diverse contours of his cultural
and political milieu. It identifies the ways in which his biography
has been variously interpreted both during his own lifetime and
since his death in 1601. Collectively, the essays examine a wealth
of diverse visual and textual manifestations of Essex: poems,
portraits, films; texts produced by Essex himself, including
private letters, prose tracts, poems and entertainments; and the
transmission and circulation of these as a means of disseminating
his political views. As well as prising open long-held assumptions
about the earl's life, the authors provide a diachronic approach to
the earl's career, identifying crucial events such as the Irish
campaign and the uprising, and re-evaluating their significance and
critical reception. Collectively, the essays illuminate the reach
and significance of the many roles played by the earl and the
impact of his brief, dazzling life on his contemporaries and on
those who came after, making this the first volume to offer a
comprehensive critical overview of the Earl's life and influence.
-- .
The visual images of Queen Elizabeth I displayed in contemporary
portraits and perpetuated and developed in more recent media, such
as film and television, make her one of the most familiar and
popular of all British monarchs.This collection of essays examines
the diversity of the queen's extensive iconographical repertoire,
focusing on both visual and textual representations of Elizabeth,
not only in portraiture and literature, but also in contemporary
sermons, speeches and alchemical treatises. The collection broadens
current critical thinking about Elizabeth, as each of the essays
contributes to the debate about the ways in which the queen's
developing iconicity was not simply a celebratory mode, but also
encoded criticism of her. Each of these essays explains the ways in
which the varied representations of Elizabeth reflect the political
and cultural anxieties of her subjects.
Recurring to the governing idea of her 2005 study Shakespeare on
the Edge, Lisa Hopkins expands the parameters of her investigation
beyond England to include the Continent, and beyond Shakespeare to
include a number of dramatists ranging from Christopher Marlowe to
John Ford. Hopkins also expands her notion of liminality to explore
not only geographical borders, but also the intersection of the
material and the spiritual more generally, tracing the contours of
the edge which each inhabits. Making a journey of its own by
starting from the most literally liminal of physical structures,
walls, and ending with the wholly invisible and intangible, the
idea of the divine, this book plots the many and various ways in
which, for the Renaissance imagination, metaphysical overtones
accrued to the physically liminal.
Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm
against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and
stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the
medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for
further investigation of the complex relationship between the
fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and
the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the
received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a
water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the
early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their
attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that
leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in
ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of
Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address
are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are
Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How
do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm
and/or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage
pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith
of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the
audience?
Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the
debate about the cultural work performed by representations of
magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in
which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of
national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its
recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic
can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is
staged and what the representational strategies and techniques
might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical
plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, The Merry Wives of
Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less
canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio,
The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late
Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two
groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in
which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or
accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational
strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well
as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal
the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary
debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect
transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of
all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of
magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation
applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic,
but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about
change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and
stereotypes.
While over the past four hundred years numerous opinions have been
voiced as to Shakespeare's identity, these eleven essays widen the
scope of the investigation by regarding Shakespeare, his world, and
his works in their interaction with one another. Instead of
restricting the search for bits and pieces of evidence from his
works that seem to match what he may have experienced, these essays
focus on the contemporary milieu-political developments, social and
theater history, and cultural and religious pressures-as well as
the domestic conditions within Shakespeare's family that shaped his
personality and are featured in his works. The authors of these
essays, employing the tenets of critical theory and practice as
well as intuitive and informed insight, endeavor to look behind the
masks, thus challenging the reader to adjudicate among the
possible, the probable, the likely, and the unlikely. With the
exception of the editor's own piece on Hamlet, Shakespeare the Man:
New Decipherings presents previously unpublished essays, inviting
the reader to embark upon an intellectual adventure into the
fascinating terrain of Shakespeare's mind and art.
The succession to the throne, Lisa Hopkins argues here, was a
burning topic not only in the final years of Elizabeth but well
into the 1630s, with continuing questions about how James's two
kingdoms might be ruled after his death. Because the issue, with
its attendant constitutional questions, was so politically
sensitive, Hopkins contends that drama, with its riddled
identities, oblique relationship to reality, and inherent blurring
of the extent to which the situation it dramatizes is indicative or
particular, offered a crucial forum for the discussion. Hopkins
analyzes some of the ways in which the dramatic works of the time -
by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster and Ford among others - reflect,
negotiate and dream the issue of the succession to the throne.
Caesarian power was a crucial context in the Renaissance, as rulers
in Europe, Russia and Turkey all sought to appropriate Caesarian
imagery and authority, but it has been surprisingly little explored
in scholarship. In this study Lisa Hopkins explores the way in
which the stories of the Caesars, and of the Julio-Claudians in
particular, can be used to figure the stories of English rulers on
the Renaissance stage. Analyzing plays by Shakespeare and a number
of other playwrights of the period, she demonstrates how early
modern English dramatists, using Roman modes of literary
representation as cover, commented on the issues of the day and
critiqued contemporary monarchs.
This collection of new essays about the earl of Essex, one of the
most important figures of the Elizabethan court, resituates his
life and career within the richly diverse contours of his cultural
and political milieu. It identifies the ways in which his biography
has been variously interpreted both during his own lifetime and
since his death in 1601. Collectively, the essays examine a wealth
of diverse visual and textual manifestations of Essex: poems,
portraits, films; texts produced by Essex himself, including
private letters, prose tracts, poems and entertainments; and the
transmission and circulation of these as a means of disseminating
his political views. As well as prising open long-held assumptions
about the earl's life, the authors provide a diachronic approach to
the earl's career, identifying crucial events such as the Irish
campaign and the uprising, and re-evaluating their significance and
critical reception. Collectively, the essays illuminate the reach
and significance of the many roles played by the earl and the
impact of his brief, dazzling life on his contemporaries and on
those who came after, making this the first volume to offer a
comprehensive critical overview of the Earl's life and influence.
-- .
Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm
against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and
stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the
medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for
further investigation of the complex relationship between the
fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and
the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the
received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a
water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the
early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their
attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that
leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in
ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of
Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address
are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are
Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How
do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm
and/or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage
pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith
of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the
audience?
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of
Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book
explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places
where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis,
Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem
alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional
Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian
orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was
under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of
Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan,
such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern
England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens,
where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients
challenged the concept of what was native and natural.
Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction offers an overview of the
ways in which the past is brought back to the surface and
influences the present in British detective fiction written between
1920 and 2020. Exploring a range of authors including Agatha
Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Val McDermid, Sarah Caudwell,
Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett, Jonathan Stroud and Ben
Aaronovitch, Lisa Hopkins argues that both the literal and literary
disinterment of the past use elements of the national past to
interrogate the present. As such, in the texts discussed,
uncovering the truth about an individual crime is also typically an
uncovering of a more general connection between the present and the
past. Whether detective novels explore murders on archaeological
digs, hauntings, cold crimes or killings at Christmas, Hopkins
explores the underlying message that you cannot understand the
present unless you understand the past.
Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction offers an overview of the
ways in which the past is brought back to the surface and
influences the present in British detective fiction written between
1920 and 2020. Exploring a range of authors including Agatha
Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Val McDermid, Sarah Caudwell,
Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett, Jonathan Stroud and Ben
Aaronovitch, Lisa Hopkins argues that both the literal and literary
disinterment of the past use elements of the national past to
interrogate the present. As such, in the texts discussed,
uncovering the truth about an individual crime is also typically an
uncovering of a more general connection between the present and the
past. Whether detective novels explore murders on archaeological
digs, hauntings, cold crimes or killings at Christmas, Hopkins
explores the underlying message that you cannot understand the
present unless you understand the past.
This collection of twelve new essays examines some of what Jane
Austen has become in the two hundred years since her death.Â
Some of the chapters explore adaptations or repurposings of her
work while others trace her influence on a surprising variety of
different kinds of writing, sometimes even when there is no
announced or obvious debt to her. Â In so doing they also
inevitably shed light on Austen herself. Austen is often considered
romantic and not often considered political, but both those
perceptions are challenged her, as is the idea that she is
primarily a writer for and about women. Her books are comic
and ironic, but they have been reworked and drawn upon in very
different genres and styles. Collectively these essays
testify to the extraordinary versatility and resonance of
Austen’s books.
This book brings together thirteen essays, by both established and
emerging scholars, which examine the most influential meanings of
roads in early modern literature and culture. Chapters develop our
understanding of the place of the road in the early modern
imagination and open various windows on a geography which may by
its nature seem passing or trivial but is in fact central to all
conceptions of movement. They also shed new light on perhaps the
most astonishing achievement of early modern plays: their use of
one small, bare space to suggest an amazing variety of physical and
potentially metaphysical locations.
This collection of twelve new essays examines some of what Jane
Austen has become in the two hundred years since her death. Some of
the chapters explore adaptations or repurposings of her work while
others trace her influence on a surprising variety of different
kinds of writing, sometimes even when there is no announced or
obvious debt to her. In so doing they also inevitably shed light on
Austen herself. Austen is often considered romantic and not often
considered political, but both those perceptions are challenged
her, as is the idea that she is primarily a writer for and about
women. Her books are comic and ironic, but they have been reworked
and drawn upon in very different genres and styles. Collectively
these essays testify to the extraordinary versatility and resonance
of Austen's books.
This book explores why crime fiction so often alludes to
Shakespeare. It ranges widely over a variety of authors including
classic golden age crime writers such as the four 'queens of crime'
(Allingham, Christie, Marsh, Sayers), Nicholas Blake and Edmund
Crispin, as well as more recent authors such as Reginald Hill, Kate
Atkinson and Val McDermid. It also looks at the fondness for
Shakespearean allusion in a number of television crime series, most
notably Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse and Lewis, and considers
the special sub-genre of detective stories in which a lost
Shakespeare play is found. It shows how Shakespeare facilitates
discussions about what constitutes justice, what authorises the
detective to track down the villain, who owns the countryside,
national and social identities, and the question of how we measure
cultural value.
Lisa Hopkins analyzes eight film adaptations which have taken
either Shakespeare or Jane Austen - icons of Englishness - out of
their original geographical or cultural context and transposed them
to a new location, allowing for a powerful interrogation both of
what these texts mean in the modern world, and of Englishness
itself.
This collection of newly commissioned essays explores the
extraordinary versatility of Renaissance tragedy and shows how it
enables exploration of issues ranging from gender to race to
religious conflict, as well as providing us with some of the
earliest dramatic representations of the lives of ordinary
Englishmen and women. The book mixes perspectives from emerging
scholars with those of established ones and offers the first
systematic examination of the full range and versatility of
Renaissance tragedy as a literary genre. It works by case study, so
that each chapter offers not only a definition of a particular kind
of Renaissance tragedy but also new research into a particularly
noteworthy or influential example of that genre. Collectively the
essays examine the work of a range of dramatists and offer a
critical overview of Renaissance tragedy as a genre. -- .
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