Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Helen Cooper
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521683068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 39

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Book Description
Helen Cooper's inaugural lecture traces the influence of medieval literature on the Renaissance, particularly in Shakespeare's work.

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Helen Cooper
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521683068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 39

Get Book

Book Description
Helen Cooper's inaugural lecture traces the influence of medieval literature on the Renaissance, particularly in Shakespeare's work.

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199558175
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them with the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern world: almost all of the histories depict events during the Hundred Years War, and King John glances even further back to the thirteenth-century Angevins; several of the comedies, tragedies, and romances rest on medieval sources; and there are important medieval antecedents for some of the poetic modes in which he worked as well. Several of the essays reread Shakespeare by recovering aspects of his works that are derived from medieval traditions and whose significance has been obscured by the desire to read Shakespeare as the origin of the modern. These essays, taken cumulatively, challenge the idea of any decisive break between the medieval period and early modernity by demonstrating continuities of form and imagination that clearly bridge the gap. Other essays explore the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries constructed or imagined relationships between past and present. Attending to the way these writers thought about their relationship to the past makes it possible, in turn, to read against the grain of our own teleological investment in the idea of early modernity. A third group of essays reads texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as documents participating in social-cultural transformation from within. This means attending to the way they themselves grapples with the problem of change, attempting to respond to new conditions and pressures while holding onto customary habits of thought and imagination. Taken together, the essays in this volume revisit the very idea of transition in a refreshingly non-teleological way.

Medieval Shakespeare

Medieval Shakespeare PDF Author: Ruth Morse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016274
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This book gives readers the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare from the perspectives of the late-medieval European traditions that surrounded him.

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Martha W. Driver
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786491655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright’s medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Alfred Thomas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319902180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Shakespeare's Kings

Shakespeare's Kings PDF Author: John Julius Norwich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743200314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
Compares the historical kings with their portrayal in Shakespeare's plays.

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare PDF Author: Robert Hornback
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
A new account of medieval and Renaissance clown traditions reveals the true extent of their cultural influence.

Shakespeare and the Medieval World

Shakespeare and the Medieval World PDF Author: Helen Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408138999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Helen Cooper's unique study examines how continuations of medieval culture into the early modern period, forged Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and poet. Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

Shakespeare's Stories of the English Middle Ages

Shakespeare's Stories of the English Middle Ages PDF Author: Peter Whisson
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595200001
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Dynastic turmoil in 15th Century England? No thanks! For many people Shakespeare's histories rank a distant third behind his tragedies and comedies. Obscure lords and long-forgotten battles. So the image goes. Yet some of these same plays tell superb stories, and contain scenes and characters that are among the liveliest and most memorable in all literature.Here, four of the very best, Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth Parts One and Two, and Henry the Fifth are presented as 'productions for the page'-consecutive stories for the modern reader. Be bemused no longer by endless kings, dukes and earls, acting out their arguments in iambic verse. Follow instead, as if in the midst of events, Shakespeare's masterly unfolding of a classic pattern of revolution, suppression of enemies, and conquest abroad.

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191569712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them with the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern world: almost all of the histories depict events during the Hundred Years War, and King John glances even further back to the thirteenth-century Angevins; several of the comedies, tragedies, and romances rest on medieval sources; and there are important medieval antecedents for some of the poetic modes in which he worked as well. Several of the essays reread Shakespeare by recovering aspects of his works that are derived from medieval traditions and whose significance has been obscured by the desire to read Shakespeare as the origin of the modern. These essays, taken cumulatively, challenge the idea of any decisive break between the medieval period and early modernity by demonstrating continuities of form and imagination that clearly bridge the gap. Other essays explore the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries constructed or imagined relationships between past and present. Attending to the way these writers thought about their relationship to the past makes it possible, in turn, to read against the grain of our own teleological investment in the idea of early modernity. A third group of essays reads texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as documents participating in social-cultural transformation from within. This means attending to the way they themselves grapples with the problem of change, attempting to respond to new conditions and pressures while holding onto customary habits of thought and imagination. Taken together, the essays in this volume revisit the very idea of transition in a refreshingly non-teleological way.