1590s Drama and Militarism
1590s Drama and Militarism

Author: Nina Taunton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1351963139

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1590s Drama and Militarism is a fascinating interdisciplinary study of various textual interventions into the military realities of the late Elizabethan period. Its major strength is its insistence on the discursive nature of militarism, and the author convincingly uses literary and non-literary texts-including manuals and contemporary military correspondence-to reconstruct the particular anxieties which surrounded the military exigencies of the 1590s, a particularly fraught and unstable period of the aging queen's reign. The literature of the 'art of war' has been little studied by literary scholars, despite their richly rhetorical nature. Dr Taunton's analysis thus brings to light a neglected but culturally significant form of Renaissance textuality. In doing so she is able to shed new light on the Renaissance drama, which she shows to have responded sensitively (and sometimes critically) to these textual constructions of actual warfare, and problematised the anxious idealisations of the military manuals. The particular readings of plays here are richly rewarding for the scholar of Renaissance drama-the significance of Henry's nocturnal surveillance of his own camp on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, for example, benefits immeasurably from being contextualised in the light of contemporary theories of encampment. The role of the women in Tamburlaine's camp in Marlowe's plays is also given particular significance when viewed in the light of the contemporary proscriptions regarding the presence of women in camps during the military campaigns in the Low Countries. In this study Dr Taunton makes appropriate (and critically inflected) use of Foucault's theories of surveillance, Lefebvre's theories about the ideological production of social space, and Michel de Certeau's theories of social practice are put to good use in her analysis of military strategy. These theoretical perspectives are usefully combined with highly specific and well-documented historical analyses.

Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era
Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era

Author: C. Breight

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1996-11-07

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 023037302X

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Curtis Breight challenges the view that Renaissance English rulers could not dominate their domestic population. He argues, alternatively, that the Elizabethan state was controlled by the Cecilian faction, which maintained power by focusing English energies outwardly. Cecilians launched relentless assaults by land and sea against England's neighbours. By the 1590s their policies had enriched a few yet destroyed countless people, and this book reads the drama of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare in relation to ongoing national and international conflict.

Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe
Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Author: Mathew R. Martin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1317008375

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Contending that criticism of Marlowe’s plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe’s plays between the tragic and the traumatic. The author argues that tragedies are trauma narratives, narratives of wounding; however, in Marlowe’s plays, a traumatic aesthetics disrupts the closure that tragedy seeks to enact. Martin’s fresh reading of Massacre at Paris, which is often dismissed by critics as a bad tragedy, presents the play as deliberately breaking the conventions of the tragic genre in order to enact a traumatic aesthetics that pulls its audience into one of the early modern period’s most notorious collective traumatic events, the massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in 1572. The chapters on Marlowe’s six other plays similarly argue that throughout Marlowe’s drama tragedy is held in tension with-and disrupted by-the aesthetics of trauma.

Shakespeare and the Ethics of War
Shakespeare and the Ethics of War

Author: Patrick Gray

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-09-13

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1789202639

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How does Shakespeare represent war? This volume reviews scholarship to date on the question and introduces new perspectives, looking at contemporary conflict through the lens of the past. Through his haunting depiction of historical bloodshed, including the Trojan War, the fall of the Roman Republic, and the Wars of the Roses, Shakespeare illuminates more recent political violence, ranging from the British occupation of Ireland to the Spanish Civil War, the Balkans War, and the past several decades of U. S. military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can a war be just? What is the relation between the ruler and the ruled? What motivates ethnic violence? Shakespeare’s plays serve as the frame for careful explorations of perennial problems of human co-existence: the politics of honor, the ethics of diplomacy, the responsibility of non-combatants, and the tension between idealism and Realpolitik.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy

Author: Heather Hirschfeld

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-06

Total Pages: 593

ISBN-13: 0191043451

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The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2003-2006
A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2003-2006

Author: Kelly DeVries

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2008-01-31

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 9047432592

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This is the second update of A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, which appeared in 2002. It is meant to do two things: to present references to works on medieval military history and technology not included in the first two volumes; and to present references to all books and articles published on medieval military history and technology from 2003 to 2006. These references are divided into the same categories as in the first two volumes and cover a chronological period of the same length, from late antiquity to 1648, again in order to present a more complete picture of influences on and from the Middle Ages. It also continues to cover the same geographical area as the first and second volume, in essence Europe and the Middle East, or, again, influences on and from this area. The languages of these bibliographical references reflect this geography.

Shakespeare's Marlowe
Shakespeare's Marlowe

Author: Robert A. Logan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1317056078

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Moving beyond traditional studies of sources and influence, Shakespeare's Marlowe analyzes the uncommonly powerful aesthetic bond between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Not only does this study take into account recent ideas about intertextuality, but it also shows how the process of tracking Marlowe's influence itself prompts questions and reflections that illuminate the dramatists' connections. Further, after questioning the commonly held view of Marlowe and Shakespeare as rivals, the individual chapters suggest new possible interrelationships in the formation of Shakespeare's works. Such examination of Shakespeare's Marlovian inheritance enhances our understanding of the dramaturgical strategies of each writer and illuminates the importance of such strategies as shaping forces on their works. Robert Logan here makes plain how Shakespeare incorporated into his own work the dramaturgical and literary devices that resulted in Marlowe's artistic and commercial success. Logan shows how Shakespeare's examination of the mechanics of his fellow dramatist's artistry led him to absorb and develop three especially powerful influences: Marlowe's remarkable verbal dexterity, his imaginative flexibility in reconfiguring standard notions of dramatic genres, and his astute use of ambivalence and ambiguity. This study therefore argues that Marlowe and Shakespeare regarded one another not chiefly as writers with great themes, but as practicing dramatists and poets-which is where, Logan contends, the influence begins and ends.

Shakespeare Against War
Shakespeare Against War

Author: Robert White

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2024-05-31

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1399516248

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Whilst Shakespearean drama provides eloquent calls to war, more often than not these are undercut or outweighed by compelling appeals to peaceful alternatives conveyed through narrative structure, dramatic context and poetic utterance. Placing Shakespeare's works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare's plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare's interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare's plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.

Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays
Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's English History Plays

Author: Laurie Ellinghausen

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2017-06-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1603293019

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Shakespeare's history plays make up nearly a third of his corpus and feature iconic characters like Falstaff, the young Prince Hal, and Richard III--as well as unforgettable scenes like the storming of Harfleur. But these plays also present challenges for teachers, who need to help students understand shifting dynastic feuds, manifold concepts of political power, and early modern ideas of the body politic, kingship, and nationhood. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," introduces instructors to the many editions of the plays, the wealth of contextual and critical writings available, and other resources. Part 2, "Approaches," contains essays on topics as various as masculinity and gender, using the plays in the composition classroom, and teaching the plays through Shakespeare's own sources, film, television, and the Web. The essays help instructors teach works that are poetically and emotionally rich as well as fascinating in how they depict Shakespeare's vision of his nation's past and present.

War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Author: Simon Barker

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2007-11-21

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0748631623

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This original study explores a vital aspect of early modern cultural history: the way that warfare is represented in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The book 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. Barker 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. Barker'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 tw