Shakespeare's Schoolroomplaces moments of considerable emotional power in Shakespeare's poetry-portraits of what his contemporaries called "the passions"-alongside the discursive and material ...practices of sixteenth-century English pedagogy. Humanist training in Latin grammar and rhetorical facility was designed to intervene in social reproduction, to sort out which differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below) were necessary to producing proper English "gentlemen." But the method adopted by Lynn Enterline in this book uncovers a rather different story from the one schoolmasters invented to promote the social efficacy of their pedagogical innovations. Beginning with the observation that Shakespeare frequently reengaged school techniques through the voices of those it excluded (particularly women), Enterline shows that when his portraits of "love" and "woe" betray their institutional origins, they reveal both the cost of a Latin education as well as the contradictory conditions of genteel masculinity in sixteenth-century Britain. In contrast to attempts to explain early modern emotion in relation to medical discourse, Enterline uncovers the crucial role that rhetoric and the texts of the classical past play in Shakespeare's passions. She relies throughout on the axiom that rhetoric has two branches that continuously interact: tropological (requiring formal literary analysis) and transactional (requiring social and historical analysis). Each chapter moves between grammar school archives and literary canon, using linguistic, rhetorical, and literary detail to illustrate the significant difference between what humanists claimed their methods would achieve and what the texts of at least one former schoolboy reveal about the institution's unintended literary and social consequences. When Shakespeare creates the convincing effects of character and emotion for which he is so often singled out as a precursor of "modern" subjectivity, he signals his debt to the Latin institution that granted him the cultural capital of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as their educational goal.
Shakespeare’s Late Work is a detailed reading of the plays written at the end of Shakespeare’s career, centring on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Unlike many previous ...studies it considers all the late work, including Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the revised Folio version of King Lear, and even what can be ascertained about the lost Cardenio. From this broadened canon emerge signs of a distinct identity for the late work. Lyne explores how Shakespeare sets great store in grand principles-faith in God, love of family, reverence for monarchs, and belief in theatrical representations of truth. However, there is also a ubiquitous and structuring irony whereby such principles are questioned and doubted. Audiences and readers are left with a difficult but empowering decision whether to believe, or to question, or to accommodate both faith and scepticism. Alongside this interest in the new and characteristically ‘late’ qualities of this phase in Shakespeare’s career. Shakespeare’s Late Work puts it in a wider cultural context. A chapter on the collaborations and broader dramatic relationships with John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton illuminates how Shakespeare’s canon interacts with other writing of its time. A chapter on how the late work revisits and reconsiders themes from earlier plays shows that continuity needs to be remembered alongside novelty. Overall this is an introduction to the key works of this period which advances a new reading of them. They emerge as fascinating and dazzling explorations of their potential and their limitations.
Why do so many Americans celebrate Shakespeare, a long-dead English poet and playwright? By the nineteenth century newly independent America had chosen to reject the British monarchy and Parliament, ...class structure and traditions, yet their citizens still made William Shakespeare a naturalized American hero. Today the largest group of overseas visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Bankside's Shakespeare's Globe Theatre come from America. Why? Is there more to Shakespeare's American popularity than just a love of men in doublet and hose speaking soliloquies? This book tells the story of America's relationship with Shakespeare. The story of how and why Shakespeare became a hero within American popular culture. Sturgess provides evidence of a comprehensive nineteenth-century appropriation of Shakespeare to the cause of the American Nation and shows that, as America entered the twentieth century a new world power, for many Americans Shakespeare had become as American as George Washington.
Shakespeare and the Second World War Makaryk, Irena R; McHugh, Marissa
Shakespeare and the Second World War,
c2012, 20121108, 2017, 2012, 2012-11-08, 2012-09-18
eBook
The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939-1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.
What do we mean when we speak of the 'late style' of a given writer, artist or composer? And what exactly do we mean by 'late Shakespeare'? Gordon McMullan argues that, far from being a natural ...phenomenon common to a handful of geniuses in old age or in proximity to death, late style is in fact a critical construct. Taking Shakespeare as his exemplar, he maps the development of the 'discourse of lateness' from the eighteenth century to the present, noting not only the mismatch between that discourse and the actual conditions for authorship in early modern theatre but also its generativity for subsequent projections of creative selfhood. He thus offers the first critique of the idea of late style, which will be of interest not only to literature specialists but also to art historians, musicologists and anyone curious about the relationship of creativity to old age and to death.
Who were Shakespeare's first readers and what did they think of his works? Offering the first dedicated account of the ways in which Shakespeare's texts were read in the centuries during which they ...were originally produced, Jean-Christophe Mayer reconsiders the role of readers in the history of Shakespeare's rise to fame and in the history of canon formation. Addressing an essential formative 'moment' when Shakespeare became a literary dramatist, this book explores six crucial fields: literacy; reading and life-writing; editing Shakespeare's text; marking Shakespeare for the theatre; commonplacing; and passing judgement. Through close examination of rare material, some of which has never been published before, and covering both the marks left by readers in their books and early manuscript extracts of Shakespeare, Mayer demonstrates how the worlds of print and performance overlapped at a time when Shakespeare offered a communal text, the ownership of which was essentially undecided.
This 2007 collection offered the first definitive study of a surprisingly underdeveloped area of scholarly investigation, namely the relationship between Shakespeare, children and childhood from ...Shakespeare's time to the present. It offers a thorough mapping of the domain in which Shakespearean childhoods need to be studied, in order to show how studying Shakespearean childhoods makes significant contributions both to Shakespearean scholarship, and to the history of childhood and its representations. The book is divided into two sections, each with a substantial introduction outlining relevant critical debates and contextualizing the rich combination of fresh research and readings of familiar Shakespearean texts that characterize the individual essays. The first part of the book examines the significance of the figure of the child in the Shakespearean canon. The second part traces the rich histories of negotiation, exchange and appropriation that have characterised Shakespeare's subsequent relations to the cultures of childhood in literary realms.
Drawing upon a vast literature in psychoanalytic journals either on Shakespeares characters, or alluding to them in the course of other topics, this book discusses eight of Shakespeares plays, and ...the relationships between the main characters in them. Psychoanalytic and literary approaches sometimes diverge, but they can also concur in seeing those characters as true-to-life examples of different psychological states and types of relating; or as symbolic aspects of the personality. The chapters contain many references from Freud onwards, and reflect many different opinions, some questionable, some convincing; the characters examined will surely ring bells in the reader. The book is relevant therefore to counsellors and therapists, but also to those interested in literature and Shakespearean studies. Written for the thinking lay person, it does not blind the reader with psychoanalytic terminology and concepts, but uses them deftly to observe some of the emotions and conflicts to which we are all to some extent prey.
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to speak of his ...ethnicity with any certainty. What did it mean to be a Moor in the early modern period? In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when England was expanding its reach across the globe, the Moor became a central character on the English stage. InThe Battle of Alcazar,Titus Andronicus,Lust's Dominion, andOthello, the figure of the Moor took definition from multiple geographies, histories, religions, and skin colors. Rather than casting these variables as obstacles to our-and England's-understanding of the Moor's racial and cultural identity, Emily C. Bartels argues that they are what make the Moor so interesting and important in the face of growing globalization, both in the early modern period and in our own. InSpeaking of the Moor, Bartels sets the early modern Moor plays beside contemporaneous texts that embed Moorish figures within England's historical record-Richard Hakluyt'sPrincipal Navigations, Queen Elizabeth's letters proposing the deportation of England's "blackamoors," and John Pory's translation ofThe History and Description of Africa. Her book uncovers the surprising complexity of England's negotiation and accommodation of difference at the end of the Elizabethan era.
