The reign of James I (1603-25) has long been overshadowed by the prior glory of Elizabeth and the later outbreak of the Civil War. Yet how, without understanding the Jacobean court, are we to understand the world of Jonson, Donne and the late Shakespeare, divine right theory, court scandal and reform, appeals to the ancient constitution and reason of state, arguments from necessity and parliamentary precedent, chivalric nostalgia and classicism, mannerist excess and baroque grandeur? In this volume an international group of specialists in history literature and political theory set about reconstructing the mental world of the Jacobean court and challenging older orthodoxies on Jacobean politics, ideology, religion and culture. While the volume marks fresh departures in the study of the Jacobean court, it makes no attempt to offer a comprehensive study of the era. Rather, it presents chapters of original research, strongly interpretive in character, and sometimes in disagreement. There
The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. This second edition of Coriolanus, edited by Lee Bliss, provides a thorough reconsideration of what was probably Shakespeare's last tragedy. In the introduction, Bliss situates the play within its contemporary social and political contexts and pays particular attention to Shakespeare's manipulation of his primary source in Plutarch's Lives. The edition is alert to the play's theatrical potential, while the stage history also attends to the politics of performance from the 1680s onwards, including European productions following the Second World War. A new introductory section by Bridget Escolme accounts for recent theatrical productions as well as scholarly criticism of the last de
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a major transformation took place in British dramatic culture. At the heart of that transformation was the controversial emergence of an illegitimate theatre, and a cultural struggle between London's patent playhouses (Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the Haymarket) and the new, so-called minor theatres. This was the first book to explore the institutions, genres, and performance history of this illegitimate theatre. Jane Moody's lively account considers the prohibition of tragedy and comedy at London's minor theatres and describes the various ingenious ways in which performers circumnavigated the law. Moody brings to light illicit productions of Shakespeare and the minor theatres' fascination with dramatic subjects censored on the legitimate stage. Illegitimate Theatre represents an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century cultural politics and also offers a powerful critique of theatre's position in the literary history
Alexander Pope was the foremost poet of early eighteenth-century England, but he was also a prolific prose writer. This anthology is intended to make Pope's major prose work more widely available. It includes the critical prefaces to his own work, to Homer, and to Shakespeare; the mock-critical treatises, A Key to the Lock and The Art of Sinking in Poetry which deride the poetry and criticism of Pope's opponents, and raise important questions about the principles of writing and interpretation; maliciously comic pamphlets attacking John Dervis, Stephen Duck, Edmund Curll, and Lord Hervey; and a selection from Pope's wide-ranging correspondence, which illustrates his genius for friendship, and his opinions on literature, politics, and religion. The volume complements the critical and moral concerns of Pope's poetry, documenting the controversies in which he was continuously engaged. Pope emerges as a gifted critic and a complex mixture of integrity and deviousness, a man concerned both f
In this classic collection of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary essays, Stanley Cavell explores a remarkably broad range of philosophical issues from politics and ethics to the arts and philosophy. The essays explore issues as diverse as the opposing approaches of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy, modernism, Wittgenstein, abstract expressionism and Schoenberg, Shakespeare on human needs, the difficulties of authorship, Kierkegaard and post-Enlightenment religion. Presented in a fresh twenty-first century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface, written by Stephen Mulhall, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this influential work is now available for a new generation of readers.
In this book, David Mann examines the influence of the Elizabethan cross-dressed tradition on the performance and conception of Shakespeare's female roles through an analysis of all 205 extant plays written for the adult theatre. The study provides both an historical context, showing how performance practice developed in the era before Shakespeare, and a comparative one, in revealing how dramatists in general treated their female characters and the influence their characterisation had upon Shakespeare's writing. The book challenges many views of the sexual ethos of Elizabethan theatre, offering instead a picture of Shakespeare which pays less attention to his supposed gender politics and more to his ability to exploit the cross-dressed convention as a dramatic medium. By challenging the gay and polemical feminist accounts that currently dominate the treatment of Elizabethan cross-dressing, the book restores its importance as a mainstream performance topic for academics and students.
Shakespeare's rise to prominence was by no means inevitable. While he was popular in his lifetime, the number of new editions and revivals of his plays declined over the following decades. Emma Depledge uses the methodologies of book and theatre history to provide a re-assessment of the reputation and dissemination of Shakespeare during the Interregnum and Restoration. She demonstrates the crucial role of the Exclusion Crisis (1678–1682), a political crisis over the royal succession, as a foundational moment in Shakespeare's canonisation. The period saw a sudden surge of theatrical alterations and a significantly increased rate of new editions and stage revivals. In the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, Shakespeare's plays were made available on a scale not witnessed since the early seventeenth century, thus reversing what might otherwise have been a permanent disappearance of his drama from canonical familiarity and firmly establishing Shakespeare's work in the national cultural imaginati
In this classic collection of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary essays, Stanley Cavell explores a remarkably broad range of philosophical issues from politics and ethics to the arts and philosophy. The essays explore issues as diverse as the opposing approaches of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy, modernism, Wittgenstein, abstract expressionism and Schoenberg, Shakespeare on human needs, the difficulties of authorship, Kierkegaard and post-Enlightenment religion. Presented in a fresh twenty-first century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface, written by Stephen Mulhall, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this influential work is now available for a new generation of readers.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a major transformation took place in British dramatic culture. At the heart of that transformation was the controversial emergence of an illegitimate theatre, and a cultural struggle between London's patent playhouses (Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the Haymarket) and the new, so-called minor theatres. This was the first book to explore the institutions, genres, and performance history of this illegitimate theatre. Jane Moody's lively account considers the prohibition of tragedy and comedy at London's minor theatres and describes the various ingenious ways in which performers circumnavigated the law. Moody brings to light illicit productions of Shakespeare and the minor theatres' fascination with dramatic subjects censored on the legitimate stage. Illegitimate Theatre represents an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century cultural politics and also offers a powerful critique of theatre's position in the literary history
Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate l
