The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England
The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England

Author: Holly Crawford Pickett

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1512825654

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England, Holly Crawford Pickett reconceptualizes early modern religious identity by exploring the astonishing stories of serial converts: historical figures such as William Alabaster, Kenelm Digby, William Chillingworth, and Marc Antonio De Dominis, along with fictional ones, who changed their religious affiliations between Catholicism and Protestantism multiple times. Pickett argues that serial converts both reveal and helped revise early modern understandings of the self. Through investigation of the techniques that serial converts used to stage and justify their conversions, Pickett demonstrates the performative nature of the act of conversion itself, offering a counternarrative to the paradigm of sincere, private conversion that was on the rise in the tumultuous years following the Reformation. Drawing from archival investigation into the lives and works of serial converts and performance studies theory, this book shows how the genres and conventions associated with conversion shaped not only forms of communication but also the very experience of conversion. By juxtaposing plays about serial conversion—by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare—with spiritual autobiographies, Pickett highlights the shared task of convert and playwright: performing conversion for an audience. Serial converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of conversion.

Bold Conscience
Bold Conscience

Author: Joshua R. Held

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2023-06-13

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0817361111

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"'Bold Conscience' chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint--what the author labels "cowardly conscience"--to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. Caught at the vortex of public and private concerns, the concept of the conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders on down to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the consequent regicide of King Charles I. Yet within this mix of perspectives, the most sinuous, complex, and ultimately lasting perspectives on bold conscience emerge from deliberately literary, rhetorically artistic voices--Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors, in re-casting the idea of conscience as a private, interior, shameful state to one of boldness fit for the public realm, parallel a historical development in which the conscience becomes a platform both for royal power and for common dissent in post-Reformation England. With the 1649 regicide of King Charles I as a fulcrum that unites both literary and historical timelines, Held tracks the increasing power of the conscience from William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Henry VIII to John Donne's court sermons, and finally to Milton's Areopagitica and Charles's defense of his kingship, Eikon Basilike. In a direct attack on Eikon Basilike, Milton destroys the prerogative of the royal conscience in Eikonoklastes, and later in Paradise Lost proposes an alternative basis for inner confidence, rooting it not in divine right but in the 'paradise within,' a metonym for conscience. Applying a fine-grain literary analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study looks backward as well to the theological foundations of the concept in Luther of the 1520s and forward to its transformation by Locke into the term 'consciousness' in 1689. Ultimately, Held's study shows how the idea of a conscience in early modern England, long central to the private self and linked to the will, memory, and mind-emerges as a nexus between the private self and the realm of public action, a bulwark against absolute sovereignty, and its attenuation as a means of more limited, personal certainty. Whether in Milton's struggle against King Charles or Hamlet's against King Claudius, the conscience born of the Reformation becomes less a state of inner critique and more a form of outward expression fit for the communal life and commitments demanded by the early modern era"--

Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman

Author: M.L. Stapleton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-23

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1317166450

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Contributions to this volume explore the idea of Marlowe as a working artist, in keeping with John Addington Symonds' characterization of him as a "sculptor-poet." Throughout the body of his work-including not only the poems and plays, but also his forays into translation and imitation-a distinguished company of established and emerging literary scholars traces how Marlowe conceives an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in his writing process. These essays necessarily overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, which signals their interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history, as well as interpretive issues within the works themselves. The contributors interpret and analyze the disputed facts of Marlowe's life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works, and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. The collection engages in new ways the controversies and complexities of its subject's life and art. It reflects the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as it shapes the twenty-first century conception of the poet and playwright as master craftsman.

The Variety
The Variety

Author:

Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press

Published: 2023-05-02

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1681145715

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A fragmentary comedy about the corruption of the judicial and monarchical systems in charge of granting aristocratic titles based on appearance instead of merit. This comedy includes several devices that are uniquely typical of Jonson’s authorial style, including the extraordinary number of five marriages in the resolution, and the intricate descriptions of the significance of outward appearance (in dance, clothing, makeup and gossip) in distinguishing anybody in Britain as superior or inferior. At the onset of the plot, Sir William is hoping to marry the wealthy-widow, Lady Beaufield, to gain access to her fortune. In parallel, Simpleton’s wealthy-widow Mother is hoping to marry a knight so she can gain the aristocratic title of a Lady. Meanwhile, Simpleton is courting Beaufield’s daughter, Lucy, who clearly favors her other suitor, Newman. Simpleton devises several schemes to win an advantage by hiring jeerers to ridicule Newman, as well as hiring Voluble to give Newman a false prophecy to manipulate him toward whoring and drinking. By the end, Simpleton even attempts to kidnap Lucy to force her into marriage. In the background of these various courtships, the French dance teacher, Galliard, is tutoring his wealthy students in dance. And Voluble and Nice are teaching proper manners, dress and other outward signs of aristocratic breeding in their Female Academy. These seemingly silly and pretty tropes are clouding the fact that Galliard confesses he has escaped being executed for attempting to overthrow the French King in 1632, and Voluble is repeatedly accused of witchcraft. More importantly, the narrative explains the corrupt process that was involved in bribing judges and administrators into allowing a wealthy gentry landowner, like Mother, to purchase her way into the aristocracy through a vacant baronet title. Mother merely has to choose between going through the ladyfying schooling herself, or completely negating her burden by hiring an actress, such as Nice (the chambermaid), to pretend to be her in public appearances. The dialogue refers to several people who were granted aristocratic titles by this corrupt process, starting with the 1st Lord of Lorne of Scotland in 1439, and as late as the Duke of Buckingham in 1623. Many of the contextual references mention the Percys’ Northumberland estate’s Scottish neighbors, as well as other Percy-associated places and people in the Buckingham Palace and Newcastle; thus, this play is likely to have been closeted by Percy until after his death because Jonson was criticizing the Percys’ involvement in these title-purchasing schemes. Percy (as the primary ghostwriter) and Jonson (as the secondary) had written about knighthood-purchasing and James I’s trade in titles to his Scottish and Scottish-adjacent comrades in Eastward Ho! These frank confessions about corruption in the monarchy led to Jonson’s temporary imprisonment in 1605. This volume includes translations of all of Jonson’s authentic letters. These include the letter he wrote in 1605, during this Eastward imprisonment, wherein Jonson asks Percy to help free him from being implicated in seditious remarks that he claims were Percy’s portion of the composition. The annotations across Variety provide a myriad of scholarly revelations, supported with precise evidence. One of these is new proof for the misdating for several antique-like forgeries of broadsheet ballads. Introductory sections explain why this play has been mis-attributed to “William Cavendish”, and the complex biographical overlaps between the Jonson and “John Donne” bylines and handwriting styles. The historical introduction to the types of dance-instructors Variety is satirizing is assisted by the translation from French into English of fragments from Apologie de la Danse or Apology for the Dance by “Par F. de Lauze” (1623). Acronyms and Figures Exordium Plot and Staging The Letters of Ben Jonson and “John Donne” “Francois de Lauze’s” Apology for the Dance (1623) Text Terms, References, Questions, Exercises

Reading Drama in Tudor England
Reading Drama in Tudor England

Author: Tamara Atkin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-17

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 1317079892

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reading Drama in Tudor England is about the print invention of drama as a category of text designed for readerly consumption. Arguing that plays were made legible by the printed paratexts that accompanied them, it shows that by the middle of the sixteenth century it was possible to market a play for leisure-time reading. Offering a detailed analysis of such features as title-pages, character lists, and other paratextual front matter, it suggests that even before the establishment of successful permanent playhouses, playbooks adopted recognisable conventions that not only announced their categorical status and genre but also suggested appropriate forms of use. As well as a survey of implied reading practices, this study is also about the historical owners and readers of plays. Examining the marks of use that survive in copies of early printed plays, it explores the habits of compilation and annotation that reflect the striking and often unpredictable uses to which early owners subjected their playbooks.

Faultlines
Faultlines

Author: Alan Sinfield

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 019811995X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early-modern England.

Shakespeare Only
Shakespeare Only

Author: Jeffrey Knapp

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-10-15

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0226445739

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare’s timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare’s uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life. In Shakespeare Only, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare’s authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually understood it. He argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater. Rewriting our current histories of authorship as well as Renaissance drama, Shakespeare Only recaptures a sense of the creative force that mass entertainment exerted on Shakespeare and that Shakespeare exerted on mass entertainment.