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Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare's Stage

Katherine Gillen

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. ... More

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity—itself a quasi-commodity—to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. The economic imagery surrounding chastity ranges from romantic evocations of treasure to more quotidian references to usury, counterfeiting, and commodity exchange. Attending to such discourse in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Chaste Value argues that representations of chastity (married fidelity as well as virginity) figure centrally within the early modern theatre’s interrogation of early capitalism, particularly with regard to the incorporation of people into commercial exchange. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labour can be incorporated into market exchange.Less

Coleridge: Lectures on Shakespeare (1811-1819)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Adam Roberts (ed.)

This book comprises a freshly composed edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton and 1818–19 Lectures on Shakespeare. Coleridge is a foundational figure in ... More

This book comprises a freshly composed edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton and 1818–19 Lectures on Shakespeare. Coleridge is a foundational figure in Shakespeare criticism, and remains to this day one of the most incisive and best. The book provides a background context into Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare, and looks into Coleridge's life and career, giving special attention to his position as a lecturer as well as the general content of his lectures. The book also explores Coleridge's relationships with August Wilhelm Schegel and William Hazlitt and their own scholarship on Shakespeare's oeuvre.Less

Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama

Farah Karim-Cooper

This study examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics. The author analyses contemporary tracts that address the then-contentious ... More

This study examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics. The author analyses contemporary tracts that address the then-contentious issue of cosmetic practice and identifies a ‘culture of cosmetics’, which finds its visual identity on the Renaissance stage. She also examines cosmetic recipes and their relationship to drama, as well as to the construction of early modern identities.Less

The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre

Susan Zimmerman

This book explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the ‘dead’ in early modern English culture within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, ... More

This book explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the ‘dead’ in early modern English culture within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, psychoanalysis and anthropology. The author argues that concepts of the corpse as a semi-animate, generative and indeterminate entity were deeply rooted in medieval religious culture. Such concepts ran counter to early modern discourses that sought to harden categorical distinctions between body/spirit, animate/inanimate – in particular, the attacks of Reformists on the materiality of ‘dead’ idols, and the rationale of the new anatomy for publicly dissecting ‘dead’ bodies. The author contends that within this context, theatrical representations of the corpse or corpse/revenant – as seen here in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries – uniquely showcased the theatre's own ideological and performative agency.Less

The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

This reference work explores the place of Shakespeare in relation to cultural processes that take in publishing, exhibiting, performing, reconstructing, and disseminating. The thirty commissioned ... More

This reference work explores the place of Shakespeare in relation to cultural processes that take in publishing, exhibiting, performing, reconstructing, and disseminating. The thirty commissioned chapters are divided into six sections: Shakespeare and the Book; Shakespeare and Music; Shakespeare on Stage and in Performance; Shakespeare and Youth Culture; Shakespeare, Visual and Material Culture; and Shakespeare, Media and Culture. Each chapter provides both a synthesis and a discussion of a topic, informed by current thinking and theoretical reflection. The book addresses Shakespeare in terms of a global frame of reference and responds to a growing critical and pedagogical interest in the relations between Shakespeare, the arts, film, performance, and mass media more generally.Less

Is Shylock Jewish?: Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare's Jews

Sara Coodin

What happens when we consider Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Veniceas a play with ‘real’ Jewish characters who are not mere ciphers for anti-Semitic Elizabethan stereotypes? Is Shylock Jewish studies ... More

What happens when we consider Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Veniceas a play with ‘real’ Jewish characters who are not mere ciphers for anti-Semitic Elizabethan stereotypes? Is Shylock Jewish studies Shakespeare’s extensive use of stories from the Hebrew Bible in The Merchant of Venice, and argues that Shylock and his daughter Jessica draw on recognisably Jewish ways of engaging with those narratives throughout the play. By examining the legacy of Jewish exegesis and cultural lore surrounding these stories, this book traces the complexity and richness of Merchant’s Jewish aspect, spanning encounters with Jews and the Hebrew Bible in the early modern world as well as modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s play on the Yiddish stage.Less

Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson

Bill Angus

This book explores the metadramatic plays and devices of Shakespeare and Jonson and finds at the core of their metadrama some disturbing connections, and even an uneasy sense of common practice, ... More

This book explores the metadramatic plays and devices of Shakespeare and Jonson and finds at the core of their metadrama some disturbing connections, and even an uneasy sense of common practice, between authors and the shadowy figure of the informer. It offers insight into the internal workings and motivations of Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s dramatic structures and opens a new window on their ambitions, concerns and fears. In doing so, it enhances our historical understanding of the structures of authority and society within which the drama was produced, and the place of the informer in those structures.Less

Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity

Andrew Mousley

Can Shakespeare help with the question of how to live? This book argues that although Shakespeare himself contributed to the uncertainties of modern living, his work can still serve as a source of ... More

Can Shakespeare help with the question of how to live? This book argues that although Shakespeare himself contributed to the uncertainties of modern living, his work can still serve as a source of existential wisdom and guidance. It examines, through a wide range of Shakespeare's plays, the conditions under which human beings flourish or perish. Love, ethics, emotion, vulnerability and humility are amongst the topics discussed as part of the book's argument that Shakespeare is continually at pains to reclaim the human from its complete liquefaction. The book offers new ways of understanding the relevance of humanism to literature and ideas of literary value, and provides an account of modernity that illuminates the relationship between ‘theory’, scepticism and literary humanism.Less

Rethinking Shakespeare's Political Philosophy: From Lear to Leviathan

Alex Schulman

This book provides a new interpretation of William Shakespeare's plays as a unified statement of early modern political theory. It demonstrates that Shakespeare's plays provide an astonishingly ... More

This book provides a new interpretation of William Shakespeare's plays as a unified statement of early modern political theory. It demonstrates that Shakespeare's plays provide an astonishingly powerful reckoning with the tradition of Western political thought, one whose depth and scope places Shakespeare alongside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. It therefore challenges the reigning viewpoint among political theorists that Shakespeare affirms ancient concepts of political virtue. It is the first attempt by a political theorist to read Shakespeare, and to place him within the trajectory of political thought as one of the authors of modernity. It looks at issues such as Shakespeare's interpretation of ancient and medieval politics, and describes how he wrestled with issues of legitimacy, religious toleration, family conflict and economic change. In this way, the author shows how Shakespeare produces a fascinating map of modern politics at its crisis-filled birth, offering new readings of many of Shakespeare's greatest plays, and extending the discussion of Shakespeare's political impact beyond his Elizabethan/Jacobean context. It also demonstrates the relevance of narrative and its various modes (comedy, tragedy, history, etc.) to our understanding of the human as a political animal.Less

Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

Catherine Belsey

The chapters in this book put theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as ... More

The chapters in this book put theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, the book demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for the book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Between them, these chapters trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades, while a new introduction offers a narrative and analytical overview, from a participant's perspective, of some of its key implications. The book shows how texts can offer access to the dissonances of the past when theory finds an outcome in practice. It provides a demonstration of poststructuralist theory at work.Less

Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics

Thomas P. Anderson

Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare’s plays reveal there is always something more terrifying to the king than rebellion. The book seeks to move beyond the presumption that ... More

Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare’s plays reveal there is always something more terrifying to the king than rebellion. The book seeks to move beyond the presumption that political evolution leads ineluctably away from autocracy and aristocracy toward republicanism and popular sovereignty. Instead, it argues for affirmative politics in Shakespeare—the process of transforming scenes of negative affect into political resistance. Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare’s affirmative politics appears not in his dialectical opposition to sovereignty, absolutism, or tyranny; nor is his affirmative politics an inchoate form of republicanism on its way to becoming politically viable. Instead, this study claims that it is in the place of dissensus that the expression of the eventful condition of affirmative politics takes place – a fugitive expression that the sovereign order always wishes to shut down. Exploring a concept of fugitive politics in Coriolanus, King John, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, The Winter’s Tale and Julius Caesar, the study contends that this investment in political theory during a time of crisis helps to explain Shakespeare’s enduring relevance to theo-political events beyond the early modern stage.Less

Shakespeare's Moral Compass

Neema Parvini

This ground-breaking study fearlessly combines latest research in evolutionary psychology, historical scholarship and philosophy to answer a question that has eluded critics for centuries: what is ... More

This ground-breaking study fearlessly combines latest research in evolutionary psychology, historical scholarship and philosophy to answer a question that has eluded critics for centuries: what is Shakespeare’s moral vision? At a political and cultural moment in which many of us are taking stock and looking for meaning, and in which moral outrage and polarisation seem endemic, this book radically reimagines how we might approach great works of literature to find some answers.Less

Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment: The Early Modern 'Fated Sky'

Sophie Chiari

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph ... More

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.Less

The Shakespearean Inside: A Study of the Complete Soliloquies and Solo Asides

Marcus Nordlund

The Shakespearean Inside is a study of all soliloquies and solo asides in Shakespeare’s complete plays. The first step in the research process was the creation of the Shakespearean Inside Database ... More

The Shakespearean Inside is a study of all soliloquies and solo asides in Shakespeare’s complete plays. The first step in the research process was the creation of the Shakespearean Inside Database (SID), where these speeches were annotated according to variables of genuine literary interest such as act, dramatic subgenre, probable time of composition, dramatic speech acts, selected figures of speech and character attributes such as gender or class. Such comprehensive and detailed data makes it possible to generalise dependably about Shakespeare’s authorial habits, and by extension, to identify situations where the author departs in interesting ways from his authorial habits. The Shakespearean Inside uses these broad patterns and significant exceptions as a backdrop for fresh interpretations of various Shakespeare plays, from early works such as The Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona to mature tragedies like Hamlet and late plays such as The Tempest and The Two Noble Kinsmen.Less

Shakespearean Maternities: Crises of Conception in Early Modern England

Chris Laoutaris

This study explores maternity in the ‘disciplines’ of early modern England. Placing the reproductive female body centre-stage in Shakespeare's theatre, it ranges beyond the domestic sphere in order ... More

This study explores maternity in the ‘disciplines’ of early modern England. Placing the reproductive female body centre-stage in Shakespeare's theatre, it ranges beyond the domestic sphere in order to recuperate the wider intellectual, epistemological and archaeological significance of maternity to the Renaissance imagination. Focusing on ‘anatomy’ in Hamlet, ‘natural history’ in The Tempest, ‘demonology’ in Macbeth, and ‘heraldry’ in Antony and Cleopatra, this book reveals the ways in which the maternal body was figured in, and in turn contributed towards the re-conceptualisation of, bodies of knowledge. The book argues that Shakespeare resists a monolithic concept of motherhood, presenting instead a range of contested ‘maternities’ which challenge the distinctive ‘ways of knowing’ these early disciplines worked to impose on the order of created nature.Less

Shakespearean Melancholy: Philosophy, Form and the Transformation of Comedy

J. F. Bernard

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and ... More

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare’s comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and, conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton, and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What’s so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy.Less

Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare

Sophie Chiari and Mickaël Popelard (eds)

Back in the late 1950s, C.P. Snow famously defined science negatively by separating it from what it was not, namely literature. Such polarization, however, creates more problems than it solves. By ... More

Back in the late 1950s, C.P. Snow famously defined science negatively by separating it from what it was not, namely literature. Such polarization, however, creates more problems than it solves. By contrast, the two co-editors of the book have adopted a dialectical approach to the subject, and to the numerous readers who keep asking themselves “what is science?”, we provide an answer from an early modern perspective, whereby “science” actually includes such various intellectual pursuits as history, poetry, occultism, or philosophy. Each essay illustrates one particular aspect of Shakespeare’s works and links science with the promise of the spectacular. This volume aims at bridging the gap between Renaissance literature and early modern science, focusing as it does on a complex intellectual territory, situated at the point of juncture between humanism, natural magic and craftsmanship. We assume that science and literature constantly interacted with one another, making clear the fact that what we now call “literature” and what we choose to see as “science” were not clearly separated in Shakespeare’s days but rather part of a common intellectual territory.Less

War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Simon Barker

This study explores the way that warfare is represented in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It contrasts the Tudor and Stuart prose that called for the establishment of a standing ... More

This study explores the way that warfare is represented in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It contrasts the Tudor and Stuart prose that called for the establishment of a standing army in the name of nation, discipline and subjectivity, and the drama of the period that invited critique of this imperative. The book examines contemporary dramatic texts both for their radical position on war and, in the case of the later drama, for their subversive commentary on an emerging idealisation of Shakespeare and his work. The book argues that the early modern period saw the establishment of political, social and theological attitudes to war that were to become accepted as natural in succeeding centuries. The book's reading of the drama of the period reveals the discontinuities in this project as a way of commenting on the use of the past within modern warfare. The book is also a survey and analysis of literary theory over the last twenty-five years in relation to the issue of early modern war — and develops an argument about the study of literature and war in general.Less