Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere

Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere PDF Author: Jeffrey S. Doty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316738000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
In late Elizabethan England, political appeals to the people were considered dangerously democratic, even seditious: the commons were supposed to have neither political voice nor will. Yet such appeals happened so often that the regime coined the word 'popularity' to condemn the pursuit of popular favor. Jeffrey S. Doty argues that in plays from Richard II to Coriolanus, Shakespeare made the tactics of popularity - and the wider public they addressed - vital aspects of politics. Shakespeare figured the public not as an extension of the royal court, but rather as a separate entity that, like the Globe's spectators who surrounded the fictional princes on its thrust stage, subjected their rulers to relentless scrutiny. For ordinary playgoers, Shakespeare's plays offered good practice for understanding the means and ends of popularity - and they continue to provide insight to the public relations strategies that have come to define modern political culture.

Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere

Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere PDF Author: Jeffrey S. Doty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316738000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book

Book Description
In late Elizabethan England, political appeals to the people were considered dangerously democratic, even seditious: the commons were supposed to have neither political voice nor will. Yet such appeals happened so often that the regime coined the word 'popularity' to condemn the pursuit of popular favor. Jeffrey S. Doty argues that in plays from Richard II to Coriolanus, Shakespeare made the tactics of popularity - and the wider public they addressed - vital aspects of politics. Shakespeare figured the public not as an extension of the royal court, but rather as a separate entity that, like the Globe's spectators who surrounded the fictional princes on its thrust stage, subjected their rulers to relentless scrutiny. For ordinary playgoers, Shakespeare's plays offered good practice for understanding the means and ends of popularity - and they continue to provide insight to the public relations strategies that have come to define modern political culture.

Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere

Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere PDF Author: Jeffrey S. Doty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107163374
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction ; 2. Richard II and the early modern public sphere ; 3. Henry IV, the theater, and the popular appetite ; 4. Political interpretation in Julius Caesar ; 5. Measure for Measure and the problem of popularity ; 6. Coriolanus the popular man ; Conclusion

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England PDF Author: Joseph Mansky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100936278X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, this interdisciplinary study traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, focusing especially on the theater. Ranging from Shakespeare to provincial pageantry, it provides a fresh account of early modern drama and the viral media ecosystem springing up around it.

Publicity and the Early Modern Stage

Publicity and the Early Modern Stage PDF Author: Allison K. Deutermann
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030523322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity’s production. The men and women associated with playing—not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions—introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.

Hamlet's Moment

Hamlet's Moment PDF Author: András Kiséry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198746202
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
'Hamlet's Moment' reveals how plays written in the first decade of the 17th century were shaped by forms of professional political knowledge and by the social promises such knowledge held, and they familiarised their audiences with them.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners

Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners PDF 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.

Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World

Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World PDF Author: Tracey A. Sowerby
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198835698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume explores core emerging themes in the study of early modern literary-diplomatic relations, developing essential methods of analysis and theoretical approaches that will shape future research in the field. Contributions focus on three intimately related areas: the impact of diplomatic protocol on literary production; the role of texts in diplomatic practice, particularly those that operated as 'textual ambassadors'; and the impact of changes in the literary sphere on diplomatic culture. The literary sphere held such a central place because it gave diplomats the tools to negotiate the pervasive ambiguities of diplomacy; simultaneously literary depictions of diplomacy and international law provided genre-shaped places for cultural reflection on the rapidly changing and expanding diplomatic sphere. Translations exemplify the potential of literary texts both to provoke competition and to promote cultural convergence between political communities, revealing the existence of diplomatic third spaces in which ritual, symbolic, or written conventions and semantics converged despite particular oppositions and differences. The increasing public consumption of diplomatic material in Europe illuminates diplomatic and literary communities, and exposes the translocal, as well as the transnational, geographies of literary-diplomatic exchanges. Diplomatic texts possessed symbolic capital. They were produced, archived, and even redeployed in creative tension with the social and ceremonial worlds that produced them. Appreciating the generic conventions of specific types of diplomatic texts can radically reshape our interpretation of diplomatic encounters, just as exploring the afterlives of diplomatic records can transform our appreciation of the histories and literatures they inspired.

England in the Age of Shakespeare

England in the Age of Shakespeare PDF Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304233X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
How did it feel to hear Macbeth's witches chant of "double, double toil and trouble" at a time when magic and witchcraft were as real as anything science had to offer? How were justice and forgiveness understood by the audience who first watched King Lear; how were love and romance viewed by those who first saw Romeo and Juliet? In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard's era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare's audiences would have recognized. These moments of recognition often reflected the audience's own experiences of what it was to, as Hamlet says, "grunt and sweat under a weary life." Black's clear and sweeping approach seeks to reclaim Shakespeare from the ivory tower and make the plays' histories more accessible to the public for whom the plays were always intended.

Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures

Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures PDF Author: Jennifer Holl
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000422216
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of the other. In five chapters, Jennifer Holl explores the early modern culture of theatrical celebrity and its resonances in print and performance, especially in Shakespeare’s interrogations of this emerging phenomenon in sonnets and histories, before moving on to examine the ways that shifting cultures of stage, film, and digital celebrity have perpetually recreated the Shakespeare, or even the #shakespeare, with whom audiences continue to interact. Situated at an intersection of multiple critical conversations, this book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriations, early modern theater, and celebrity studies.

Spheres of Influence

Spheres of Influence PDF Author: Alex Benchimol
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039105397
Category : Culture
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which intellectual and cultural publics from the early modern period to the postmodern present have actively constructed their cultural identities within the social processes of modernity. It brings together some of the most compelling recent writing on the public sphere by scholars in the fields of literary history, cultural studies and social theory from both sides of the Atlantic. Taken together, the essays in this collection offer a major re-examination of recent scholarship on the theory of the public sphere as developed by Jürgen Habermas. They also stand as a collective effort both to interrogate and to extend this influential model by exploring modern forms of intellectual and cultural activity in all their rich diversity and ideological complexity. Contributions range from the divided inheritance of Shakespeare publishing history to the new forms of mass-mediated cultural experience in contemporary Britain; from attempts at cultural regulation in the literary public sphere of the Romantic period to the postmodern political conflict played out in the American public sphere of the 1990s; and from varieties of religious dissent to modes of postcolonial criticism. The book furthers the dialogue between academic methodologies, fields and periods, and presents readers with a contested narrative of the key cultural and intellectual practices that have made up our modern world.