Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England PDF Author: Walter S H Lim
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031400062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
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 the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England PDF Author: Walter S H Lim
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031400062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
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 PDF Author: David Loewenstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239810
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book

Book Description
Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history.

Religion and Drama in Early Modern England

Religion and Drama in Early Modern England PDF Author: Elizabeth Williamson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317068106
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book

Book Description
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 PDF Author: Richard Dutton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719063633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book

Book Description
Publisher Description

Shakespeare and Religious Change

Shakespeare and Religious Change PDF Author: K. Graham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230240852
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book

Book Description
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 PDF Author: Dennis Taylor
Publisher: Studies in Religion and Litera
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Get Book

Book Description
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'.

Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama

Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Lieke Stelling
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108757243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 508

Get Book

Book Description
Few subjects of the English stage have proved more alluring and enduring than religious conversion. The emergence of the Elizabethan theatre marked a profound shift in the way in which conversion was presented. If medieval drama had encouraged conversion without reservation, early Elizabethan plays started to question it. Considering over forty canonical and lesser known works, this study argues that more so than any other medium, early modern drama engaged with the question of the possibility of undergoing a radical transformation in faith and presented the period's understanding of it as fundamentally unsettled. Offering the first cross-religious exploration of conversion in early modern English drama, and presenting a new reading of William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, Lieke Stelling reveals telling patterns in the stage's treatment of conversion and religious identity.

Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare

Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare PDF Author: Katherine Steele Brokaw
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140500
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Shakespeare and Religion

Shakespeare and Religion PDF Author: Alison Shell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408143615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
This book sets Shakespeare in the religious context of his times, presenting a balanced, up-to-date account of current biographical and critical debates, and addressing the fascinating, under-studied topic of how Shakespeare's writing was perceived by literary contemporaries - both Catholic and Protestant - whose priorities were more obviously religious than his own. It advances new readings of several plays, especially Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale; these draw in many cases on new and under-exploited contemporary analogues, ranging from conversion narratives, books of devotion and polemical pamphlets to manuscript drama and emblems. Shakespeare's writing has been seen both as profoundly religious, giving everyday human life a sacramental quality, and as profoundly secular, foreshadowing the kind of humanism that sees no necessity for God. This study attempts to reconcile these two points of view, describing a writer whose language is saturated in religious discourse and whose dramaturgy is highly attentive to religious precedent, but whose invariable practice is to subordinate religious matter to the particular aesthetic demands of the work in hand. For Shakespeare, as for few of his contemporaries, the Judaeo-Christian story is something less than a master narrative.

Secret Shakespeare

Secret Shakespeare PDF Author: Richard Wilson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719070242
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
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.