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Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192529919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners is a highly original contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. It breaks important new ground in introducing readers, lay and scholarly alike, to the existence and character of the political culture of the mass of ordinary commoners in Shakespeare's England, as revealed by the recent findings of 'the new social history'. The volume thereby helps to challenge the traditional myths of a non-political commons and a culture of obedience. It also brings together leading Shakespeareans, who digest recent social history, with eminent early modern social historians, who turn their focus on Shakespeare. This genuinely cross-disciplinary approach generates fresh readings of over ten of Shakespeare's plays and locates the impress on Shakespearean drama of popular political thought and pressure in this period of perceived crisis. The volume is unique in engaging and digesting the dramatic importance of the discoveries of the new social history, thereby resituating and revaluing Shakespeare within the social depth of politics.
Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192529919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners is a highly original contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. It breaks important new ground in introducing readers, lay and scholarly alike, to the existence and character of the political culture of the mass of ordinary commoners in Shakespeare's England, as revealed by the recent findings of 'the new social history'. The volume thereby helps to challenge the traditional myths of a non-political commons and a culture of obedience. It also brings together leading Shakespeareans, who digest recent social history, with eminent early modern social historians, who turn their focus on Shakespeare. This genuinely cross-disciplinary approach generates fresh readings of over ten of Shakespeare's plays and locates the impress on Shakespearean drama of popular political thought and pressure in this period of perceived crisis. The volume is unique in engaging and digesting the dramatic importance of the discoveries of the new social history, thereby resituating and revaluing Shakespeare within the social depth of politics.
Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
This book is a landmark study of Shakespeare’s politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that "Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare’s Histories and Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values. Part Two focuses Queen Elizabeth’s principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England’s most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in Richard II and Henry IV a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth’s throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. Founded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas.
Author: Bernard J. Dobski
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739170961
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
mate Shakespeare’s corpus, and one of the most prominent is the image of the body. Sketched out in the eternal lines of his plays and poetry, and often drawn in exquisite detail, variations on the body metaphor abound in the works of Shakespeare. Attention to the political dimensions of this metaphor in Shakespeare and the Body Politic permits readers to examine the sentiments of romantic love and family life, the enjoyment of peace, prosperity and justice, and the spirited pursuit of honor and glory as they inevitably emerge within the social, moral, and religious limits of particular political communities. The lessons to be learned from such an examination are both timely and timeless. For the tensions between the desires and pursuits of individuals and the health of the community forge the sinews of every body politic, regardless of the form it may take or even where and when one might encounter it. In his plays and poetry Shakespeare illuminates these tensions within the body politic, which itself constitutes the framework for a flourishing community of human beings and citizens—from the ancient city-states of Greece and Rome to the Christian cities and kingdoms of early modern Europe. The contributors to this volume attend to the political context and role of political actors within the diverse works of Shakespeare that they explore. Their arguments thus exhibit together Shakespeare’s political thought. By examining his plays and poetry with the seriousness they deserve, Shakespeare’s audiences and readers not only discover an education in human and political virtue, but also find themselves written into his lines. Shakespeare’s body of work is indeed politic, and the whole that it forms incorporates us all.
Author: John Albert Murley
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739116845
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Shows us that Shakespeare's poetic imagination displays the essence of politics and inspires reflection on the fundamental questions of statesmanship and political leadership. This book explores themes such as classical republicanism and liberty, the rule of law and morality, the nature and limits of statesmanship, and the character of democracy.
Author: Robin Headlam Wells
Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Author: Chris Fitter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136575820
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
This book argues that Shakespeare was permanently preoccupied with the brutality, corruption, and ultimate groundlessness of the political order of his state, and that the impact of original Tudor censorship, supplemented by the relatively depoliticizing aesthetic traditions of later centuries, have together obscured the consistent subversiveness of his work. Traditionally, Shakespeare’s political attitudes have been construed either as primarily conservative, or as essays in richly imaginative ambiguation, irreducible to settled viewpoints. Fitter contends that government censorship forced superficial acquiescence upon Shakespeare in establishment ideologies — monarchic, aristocratic and patriarchal — that were enunciated through rhetorical set pieces, but that Shakespeare the dramatist learned from Shakespeare the actor a variety of creative methods for sabotaging those perspectives in performance in the public theatres. Using historical contextualizations and recuperation of original performance values, the book argues that Shakespeare emerged as a radical writer not in middle age with King Lear and Coriolanus — plays whose radicalism is becoming widely recognized — but from his outset, with Henry VI and Taming of the Shrew. Recognizing Shakespeare’s allusiveness to 1590s controversies and dissident thought, and recovering the subtextual politics of Shakespeare’s distinctive stagecraft reveals populist, at times even radical meaning and a substantially new, and astonishingly interventionist, Shakespeare.
Author: Kristin M.S. Bezio
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1839106425
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership examines problems, challenges, and crises in our contemporary world through the lens of William Shakespeare’s plays, one of the best-known, most admired, and often controversial authors of the last half-millennium.
Author: Victoria Milhan
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640775244
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 25
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Bonn (Anglistik), course: Hauptseminar, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction William Shakespeare is the most important playwright of the English Renaissance period. His career bridged the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and James I. When the play Julius Caesar was first performed in 1599 at the Globe theatre1, Queen Elizabeth I had been on the throne for nearly 40 years. She was 66 years old at that time and she, like Caesar, did not have any children. People feared what would happen after her death. Shakespeare commented on this political situation by writing Julius Caesar. Censorship did not allow direct comments on contemporary political affairs. 2 Julius Caesar is the shortest play by William Shakespeare full of fast action and rhetoric. It takes place in ancient Rome in 44 B.C. It was a time when the empire suffered greatly from a clear division between citizens represented by the senate and the plebeian masses. The people feared that Caesar's power would lead to Roman citizens being slaves. That is why Caesar was assassinated. This paper will deal with the commoners and their treatment by the tribunes in the opening scene of the play. It will also give an insight into the speeches of Brutus and Antony and their effects on the plebeians in the second scene of the third act.
Author: Peter Lake
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300225660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 683
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Book Description
A masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare’s plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan England With an ageing, childless monarch, lingering divisions due to the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare’s England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems. In this monumental work, Peter Lake reveals, more than any previous critic, the extent to which Shakespeare’s plays speak to the depth and sophistication of Elizabethan political culture and the Elizabethan imagination. Lake reveals the complex ways in which Shakespeare’s major plays engaged with the events of his day, particularly regarding the uncertain royal succession, theological and doctrinal debates, and virtue and virtù in politics. Through his plays, Lake demonstrates, Shakespeare was boldly in conversation with his audience about a range of contemporary issues. This remarkable literary and historical analysis pulls the curtain back on what Shakespeare was really telling his audience and what his plays tell us today about the times in which they were written.
Author: O. B. Hardison
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political plays, English
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
