Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history.

This title offers a fresh approach to the plays that suggests they can be seen as metaphysical 'experiments' conducted in the medium of drama.Metaphysics is usually associated with that part of the philosophical tradition which asks about 'last things', questions such as: How many substances are there in the world? Which is more fundamental, quantity or quality? Are events prior to things, or do they happen to those things? While he wasn't a philosopher, Shakespeare was obviously interested in 'ultimates' of this sort. Instead of probing these issues with argument, however, he did so with plays. "Shakespearean Metaphysics" argues for Shakespeare's inclusion within a metaphysical tradition that opposes empiricism and Cartesian dualism.Through close readings of three major plays - "The Tempest", "King Lear" and "Twelfth Night" - Witmore proposes that Shakespeare's manner of depicting life on stage itself constitutes an 'answer' to metaphysical questions raised by later thinkers such as Spinoza, Bergson, and Whitehead. Each of these readings shifts the interpretative frame around the plays in radical ways; taken together they show the limits of our understanding of theatrical play as an 'illusion' generated by the physical circumstances of production."Shakespeare Now!" is a series of short books that engage imaginatively and often provocatively with the possibilities of Shakespeare's plays. It goes back to the source - the most living language imaginable - and recaptures the excitement, audacity and surprise of Shakespeare. It will return you to the plays with opened eyes.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume of 14 original essays by historians and literary scholars explores childhood and children's books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800. The collection aims to reposition childhood as a compelling presence in early modern imagination--a ready emblem of innocence, mischief, and playfulness. The essays offer a wide-ranging basis for reconceptualizing the development of a separate literature for children as central to evolving early modern concepts of human development and socialization. Among the topics covered are constructs of literacy as revealed by the figure of Goody Two Shoes, notions of pedagogy and academic standards, a reception study of children's reading based on book purchases made by Rugby school boys in the late eighteenth-century, an analysis of the first international best-seller for children, the abbe Pluche's Spectacle de la nature, and the commodification of child performers in Jacobean comedies.

Why do we continue to experience many of Shakespeare's dramatic characters as real people with personal histories, individual personalities, and psychological depth? What is it that makes Falstaff seem to jump off the page, and what gives Hamlet his complexity? Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance examines how the extraordinary lifelikeness of some of Shakespeare's most enigmatic and self-conscious characters is produced through language. Using theories drawn from linguistic pragmatics, this book claims that our impression of characters as real people is an effect arising from characters' pragmatic use of language in combination with the historical and textual meanings that Shakespeare conveys to his audience by dramatic and meta-dramatic means. Challenging the notion of interiority attributed to Shakespeare's characters by many contemporary critics, theatre professionals, and audiences, the book demonstrates that dramatic characters possess anteriority which gives us the impression that they exist outside of- and prior to- the play-texts as real people. Jelena Marelj's study examines five linguistically self-conscious characters drawn from the genres of history, tragedy and comedy, which continue to be subjects of extensive critical debate: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Henry V, Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet. She shows that by inferring Shakespeare's intentions through his characters' verbal exchanges and the discourses of the play, the audience becomes emotionally involved with or repulsed by characters and it is this emotional response that makes these characters strikingly memorable and intimately human. Shakespearean Character will equip readers for further work on the genealogy of Shakespearean character, including minor characters, stock characters, and allegorical characters.

What led Shakespeare to write his most cryptic poem, 'The Phoenix and Turtle'? Could the Phoenix represent Queen Elizabeth, on the verge of death as Shakespeare wrote? Is the Earl of Essex, recently executed for treason, the Turtledove lover of the Phoenix? Questions such as these dominate scholarship of both Shakespeare's poem and the book in which it first appeared: Robert Chester's enigmatic collection of verse, Love's Martyr (1601), where Shakespeare's allegory sits next to erotic love lyrics by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, as well as work by the much lesser-known Chester. Don Rodrigues critiques and revises traditional computational attribution studies by integrating the insights of queer theory to a study of Love's Martyr. A book deeply engaged in current debates in computational literary studies, it is particularly attuned to questions of non-normativity, deviation and departures from style when assessing stylistic patterns. Gathering insights from decades of computational and traditional analyses, it presents, most radically, data that supports the once-outlandish theory that Shakespeare may have had a significant hand in editing works signed by Chester. At the same time, this book insists on the fundamentally collaborative nature of production in Love's Martyr. Developing a compelling account of how collaborative textual production could work among early modern writers, Shakespeare's Queer Analytics is a much-needed methodological intervention in computational attribution studies. It articulates what Rodrigues describes as 'queer analytics': an approach to literary analysis that joins the non-normative close reading of queer theory to the distant attention of computational literary studies - highlighting patterns that traditional readings often overlook or ignore.

Collapsing buildings, unexpected meetings in the marketplace, monstrous births, encounters with pirates at sea--these and other unforeseen "accidents" at the turn of the seventeenth century in England acquired unprecedented significance in the early modern philosophical and cultural imagination. Drawing on intellectual history, cultural criticism, and rhetorical theory, this book chronicles the narrative transformation of "accident" from a philosophical dead end to an astonishing occasion for revelation and wonder in early modern religious life, dramatic practice, and experimental philosophy.
Embracing the notion that accident was a concept with both learned and popular appeal, the book traces its evolution through Aristotelian, Scholastic, and Calvinist thought into a range of early modern texts. It suggests that for many English writers, accidental events raised fundamental questions about the nature of order in the world and the way that order should be apprehended.
Alongside texts by such canonical figures as Shakespeare and Bacon, this study draws on several lesser-known authors of sensational news accounts about accidents that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century. The result is a cultural anatomy of accidents as philosophical problem, theatrical conceit, spiritual landmark, and even a prototype for Baconian "experiment," one that provides a fresh interpretation of the early modern engagement with contingency in intellectual and cultural terms.

Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history.

What led Shakespeare to write his most cryptic poem, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’? Could the Phoenix represent Queen Elizabeth, on the verge of death as Shakespeare wrote? Is the Earl of Essex, recently executed for treason, the Turtledove lover of the Phoenix? Questions such as these dominate scholarship of both Shakespeare’s poem and the book in which it first appeared: Robert Chester’s enigmatic collection of verse, Love’s Martyr (1601), where Shakespeare’s allegory sits next to erotic love lyrics by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, as well as work by the much lesser-known Chester. Don Rodrigues critiques and revises traditional computational attribution studies by integrating the insights of queer theory to a study of Love's Martyr. A book deeply engaged in current debates in computational literary studies, it is particularly attuned to questions of non-normativity, deviation and departures from style when assessing stylistic patterns. Gathering insights from decades of computational and traditional analyses, it presents, most radically, data that supports the once-outlandish theory that Shakespeare may have had a significant hand in editing works signed by Chester. At the same time, this book insists on the fundamentally collaborative nature of production in Love’s Martyr. Developing a compelling account of how collaborative textual production could work among early modern writers, Shakespeare’s Queer Analytics is a much-needed methodological intervention in computational attribution studies. It articulates what Rodrigues describes as ‘queer analytics’: an approach to literary analysis that joins the non-normative close reading of queer theory to the distant attention of computational literary studies – highlighting patterns that traditional readings often overlook or ignore.

Metaphysics is usually associated with that part of the philosophical tradition which asks about 'last things', questions such as: How many substances are there in the world? Which is more fundamental, quantity or quality? Are events prior to things, or do they happen to those things? While he wasn't a philosopher, Shakespeare was obviously interested in 'ultimates' of this sort. Instead of probing these issues with argument, however, he did so with plays. Shakespearean Metaphysics argues for Shakespeare's inclusion within a metaphysical tradition that opposes empiricism and Cartesian dualism. Through close readings of three major plays - The Tempest, King Lear and Twelfth Night - Witmore proposes that Shakespeare's manner of depicting life on stage itself constitutes an 'answer' to metaphysical questions raised by later thinkers as Spinoza, Bergson, and Whitehead. Each of these readings shifts the interpretative frame around the plays in radical ways; taken together they show the limits of our understanding of theatrical play as an 'illusion' generated by the physical circumstances of production.

Children had surprisingly central roles in many of the public performances of the English Renaissance, whether in entertainments civic pageants, children's theaters, Shakespearean drama or in more grim religious and legal settings, as when children were "possessed by demons" or testified as witnesses in witchcraft trials. Taken together, such spectacles made repeated connections between child performers as children and the mimetic powers of fiction in general.

In Pretty Creatures, Michael Witmore examines the ways in which children, with their proverbial capacity for spontaneous imitation and their imaginative absorption, came to exemplify the virtues and powers of fiction during this era. As much concerned with Renaissance poetics as with children's roles in public spectacles of the period, Pretty Creatures attempts to bring the antics of children and the rich commentary these antics provoked into the mainstream of Renaissance studies, performance studies, and studies of reformation culture in England. As such, it represents an alternative history of the concept of mimesis in the period, one that is built from the ground up through reflections on the actual performances of what was arguably nature's greatest mimic: the child."

Why do we continue to experience many of Shakespeare's dramatic characters as real people with personal histories, individual personalities, and psychological depth? What is it that makes Falstaff seem to jump off the page, and what gives Hamlet his complexity? Shakespearean Character: Language in Performance examines how the extraordinary lifelikeness of some of Shakespeare's most enigmatic and self-conscious characters is produced through language. Using theories drawn from linguistic pragmatics, this book claims that our impression of characters as real people is an effect arising from characters' pragmatic use of language in combination with the historical and textual meanings that Shakespeare conveys to his audience by dramatic and meta-dramatic means. Challenging the notion of interiority attributed to Shakespeare's characters by many contemporary critics, theatre professionals, and audiences, the book demonstrates that dramatic characters possess anteriority which gives us the impression that they exist outside of- and prior to- the play-texts as real people. Jelena Marelj's study examines five linguistically self-conscious characters drawn from the genres of history, tragedy and comedy, which continue to be subjects of extensive critical debate: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Henry V, Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet. She shows that by inferring Shakespeare's intentions through his characters' verbal exchanges and the discourses of the play, the audience becomes emotionally involved with or repulsed by characters and it is this emotional response that makes these characters strikingly memorable and intimately human. Shakespearean Character will equip readers for further work on the genealogy of Shakespearean character, including minor characters, stock characters, and allegorical characters.

In this collaborative work, photographer Rosamond Purcell and Shakespeare scholar Michael Witmore explore the transcendent emotion in Shakespeare's work through photographs, pairing the allusive power of images with the subversive effects of Shakespeare's language. The book takes advantage of oblique connections to reveal things that cannot be represented directly on stage. Purcell has pioneered the technique of capturing reflections in antique mercury glass apothecary jars, resulting in haunting images that seem to move with the liquid quickness of ideas. These images are an attempt to capture Shakespeare's expansive imagination in action what Coleridge called his "myriad-mindedness": they take a visceral journey into the world of his plays. Witmore has paired each photograph with a short passage from Shakespeare's plays with an uncanny sense of the playwright's intent."