Politics Plague And Shakespeare S Theater

Shakespeare produced most of his great tragedies during the politically disturbed and plague-filled decade following the accession of James I, a period of formidable difficulties for the London theater. Focusing not upon Shakespeare's personal biography but upon his professional role as a member of the company of the King's Servants, Leeds Barroll offers a new narrative about the dramatist's relationship to the court of King James, as well as the manner and order in which the Stuart plays were composed. Positioned in terms of contemporary critical and historical theory, rich in historical details, and challenging in its implications, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theatre will be read with interest by scholars and students of Elizabethan drama, theater history, Renaissance studies, and English history.

Shakespeare’s plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe’s Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth. Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity’s rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth’s reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule.

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>

Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617 is the first book to consider railing plays and pamphlets as participating in a coherent literary movement that dominated much of the English literary landscape during the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. Author Prendergast considers how these crisis-ridden texts on religious, gender, and aesthetic controversies were encouraged and supported by the emergence of the professional theater and print pamphlets. She argues that railing texts by Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson, Jane Anger and others became sites for articulating anxious emotions-including fears about the stability of England after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the increasing factional splits between Protestant groups. But, given that railings about religious and political matters often led to censorship or even death, most railing writers chose to circumvent such possible repercussions by railing against unconventional gender identity, perverse sexual proclivities, and controversial aesthetics. In the process, Prendergast argues, railers shaped an anti-aesthetics that was itself dependent on the very expressions of perverse gender and sexuality that they discursively condemned, an aesthetics that created a conceptual third space in which bitter enemies-male or female, conformist or nonconformist-could bond by engaging in collaborative experiments with dialogical invective. By considering a literary mode of articulation that vehemently counters dominant literary discourse, this book changes the way that we look at late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature, as it associates works that have been studied in isolation from each other with a larger, coherent literary movement.

Alternative Shakespeares, published in 1985, shook up the world of Shakespearean studies, demythologising Shakespeare and applying new theories to the study of his work. Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 investigates Shakespearean criticism over a decade later, introducing new debates and new theorists into the frame. Both established scholars and new names appear here, providing a broad cross-section of contemporary Shakespearean studies, including psychoanalysis, sexual and gender politics, race and new historicism. Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2 represents the forefront of contemporary Shakespearean studies. This urgently-needed addition to a classic work of literary criticism is one which teachers and scholars will welcome.

Introducing new debates and new theorists, this collection provides a broad cross-section of contemporary Shakespearen studies, including psychoanalysis, sexual and gender politics, race and new historicism.

Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to “plague writing” from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human “hardware” has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human “software” (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, select plays by Shakespeare, and modern “plague” fiction and film, Alfred Thomas convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between the Black Death and COVID-19. In showing how in times of plague human beings repress their fears and fantasies and displace them onto the threatening “other,” Thomas highlights the danger of scapegoating vulnerable minority groups such as Asian Americans and Jews in today’s America. This wide-ranging study will thus be of interest not only to medievalists but also to students of modernity as well as the general reader.

'Shakespeare's Money' explores what archival records can reveal about Shakespeare's economic and social success, shedding light on how he elevated his family from lowly status to minor gentry and how economic concerns were ever present in his daily life.