Few plays make such varied or such bravura use of soliloquies as Shakespeare’s Richard III. The opening forty-one-line monologue by Richard himself allows an actor to show what he can do and to ...capture his audience and offers a view on processes of historical causation: having started with six uses of the word ‘our’, Richard not only moves on to say ‘I’ nine times (supplemented by ‘my’ and ‘me’), but also explains that his plans are going to affect the future of others, too. His plot to set his brothers against each other is going to change the course of history; moreover, it will do so by using the stalking-horse of a prophecy, a form of speech which presumes that the future is already unalterably fixed. Other soliloquies in the play also offer insights into historical process. This paper examines the differing tonality of the play’s soliloquies and the kind of information offered in them to argue that while Richard III officially subscribes to Tudor myths of the past, it not only implicitly urges the audience to a more sceptical take, but in fact raises questions about whether we can ever be sure about how history was made.
When Shakespeare bestows the name Michael Cassio on a character in Othello he would doubtless have been aware of some distinguised antecedents, including his friend Michael Drayton and two other ...authors whom he did not know personally but was fond of reading, Michel de Montaigne and Miguel Cervantes. Less immediately, several historical persons of the name, perhaps most notably the Emperor Michael Palaeologus, are mentioned in a number of early modern texts. Michael does not seem to have been a common name in England, and it was also a name not much found in plays, or at least not in extant ones. In this essay I focus on three plays in which characters called Michael appear, Arden of Faversham, Othello, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and I shall argue that each draws in one way or another on one or more of the inherently paradoxical associations held by the name Michael in the early modern period, which suggested simultaneously money and sanctity, corporeality and spirituality, and past and future. All three of these Michaels, whether unwillingly or unwittingly, have the same effect of either causing or participating in the disruption of domestic relationships and the pitting of family members against each other. In their own very different ways, each of these three characters could be seen as emblematising or underlining the effect of sin in the home, and also perhaps as drawing attention to the dual nature of humans as having both a mortal (social, familial, and material) life and an immortal soul, in something of the same way as Michael’s strange status as both saint and archangel makes him eligible to be simultaneously understood both as someone who was once alive and as an entity always wholly spiritual.
England's land borders with Scotland and Wales, together with the narrow channels separating the British mainland from Ireland and the Continent, were the focus of acute, if intermittent, unease ...during the early modern period. This book analyses works by not only Shakespeare but also his contemporaries to argue that many of the plays of Shakespeare's central period, from the second tetralogy to Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello, engage with the idea of England's borders.
Hopkins argues the succession to the throne was a burning topic not only in the final years of Elizabeth but well into the 1630s, and drama, with its disguised identities and oblique relationship to ...reality, was a safe way to air it. Hopkins analyzes some of the ways in which plays-from Marlowe's and Shakespeare's to Webster's and Ford's-reflect, negotiate and dream the issue of the succession.
These twelve new essays show the variety and versatility of Renaissance tragedy and highlight the issues it explores. Each chapter defines a particular kind of Renaissance tragedy and offers new ...research on a particularly striking example. Collectively the essays offer a critical overview of Renaissance tragedy as a genre.
“The noble Cavendishes were one of the most influential families in the politics and culture of early modern England and beyond. A Companion to the Cavendishes offers a comprehensive account of the ...Cavendish family's creative output and cultural significance in the seventeenth century. It discusses the writings of individuals including William and Margaret Cavendish, and William's daughters Jane and Elizabeth; family members' work and patronage in other media such as music, architecture, and the visual arts; their participation in contemporary developments in politics, philosophy, and horsemanship; and the networks in which they moved both in England and in continental Europe. It also covers the work of less well-known family members such as the poet and biographer George Cavendish and the composer Michael Cavendish. This volume combines path-breaking scholarship with discussion of existing research, making it an invaluable resource for all those interested in this fascinating and diverse group of men and women.”
Considering a variety of questions centering on magic and, or in, performance, this volume furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern ...English stage. Collectively the essays show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects and subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to effect transformation in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.
