Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England
Author: Walter S H Lim
Publsiher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2024-01-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783031400063

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This book analyzes Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare’s literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare’s deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare’s engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.

Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion

Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion
Author: David Loewenstein,Michael Witmore
Publsiher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2015-01-22
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781107026612

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This volume freshly illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs, practices and issues, and their representation in Shakespeare's plays.

Religion and Drama in Early Modern England

Religion and Drama in Early Modern England
Author: Elizabeth Williamson
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781317068105

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Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.

Theatre and Religion

Theatre and Religion
Author: Richard Dutton,Alison Gail Findlay,Richard Wilson
Publsiher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 0719063639

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Publisher Description

Shakespeare and Religious Change

Shakespeare and Religious Change
Author: K. Graham,P. Collington
Publsiher: Springer
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2009-07-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780230240858

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This balanced and innovative collection explores the relationship of Shakespeare's plays to the changing face of early modern religion, considering the connections between Shakespeare's theatre and the religious past, the religious identities of the present and the deep cultural changes that would shape the future of religion in the modern world.

Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England

Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England
Author: Dennis Taylor,David N. Beauregard
Publsiher: Studies in Religion and Litera
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2003
Genre: Art
ISBN: UOM:39015052881615

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The question of Shakespeare's Catholic contexts has occupied many scholars in recent years and this study brings together 16 original essays examining Shakespeare's work in the light of revisionist scholarship, from monastic life in 'Measure for Measure' to Puritanism in 'Hamlet'.

Secret Shakespeare

Secret Shakespeare
Author: Richard Wilson
Publsiher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2004
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0719070244

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Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the last century. No biography of the Bard is now complete without chapters on the paranoia and persecution in which he was educated, or the treason which engulfed his family. Whether to suffer outrageous fortune or take up arms in suicidal resistance was, as Hamlet says, 'the question' that fired Shakespeare's stage. In 'Secret Shakespeare' Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived.Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a 'golden time' of future toleration, 'What's to come' is always unsure. Whether or not 'He died a papist', it is because we can never 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist.This is a fascinating work, which will be essential reading for all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies.

Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare

Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare
Author: Katherine Steele Brokaw,Jason Zysk
Publsiher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2019-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780810140509

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The term “secular” inspires thinking about disenchantment, periodization, modernity, and subjectivity. The essays in Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare argue that Shakespeare’s plays present “secularization” not only as a historical narrative of progress but also as a hermeneutic process that unleashes complex and often problematic transactions between sacred and secular. These transactions shape ideas about everything from pastoral government and performative language to wonder and the spatial imagination. Thinking about Shakespeare and secularization also involves thinking about how to interpret history and temporality in the contexts of Shakespeare’s medieval past, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, and the critical dispositions that define Shakespeare studies today. These essays reject a necessary opposition between “sacred” and “secular” and instead analyze how such categories intersect. In fresh analyses of plays ranging from Hamlet and The Tempest to All’s Well that Ends Well and All Is True, secularization emerges as an interpretive act that explores the cultural protocols of representation within both Shakespeare’s plays and the critical domains in which they are studied and taught. The volume’s diverse disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches shift our focus from literal religion and doctrinal issues to such aspects of early modern culture as theatrical performance, geography, race, architecture, music, and the visual arts.