Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres
Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare’s Genres

Author: Claude Fretz

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-02-05

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 3030135195

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This book explores how Shakespeare uses images of dreams and sleep to define his dramatic worlds. Surveying Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories, and late plays, it argues that Shakespeare systematically exploits early modern physiological, religious, and political understandings of dreams and sleep in order to reshape conventions of dramatic genre, and to experiment with dream-inspired plots. The book discusses the significance of dreams and sleep in early modern culture, and explores the dramatic opportunities that this offered to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It also offers new insights into how Shakespeare adapted earlier literary models of dreams and sleep – including those found in classical drama, in medieval dream visions, and in native English dramatic traditions. The book appeals to academics, students, teachers, and practitioners in the fields of literature, drama, and cultural history, as well as to general readers interested in Shakespeare’s works and their cultural context.

Shakespeare and Science
Shakespeare and Science

Author: Katherine Walker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-12-02

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1350044636

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With the recent turn to science studies and interdisciplinary research in Shakespearean scholarship, Shakespeare and Science: A Dictionary, provides a pedagogical resource for students and scholars. In charting Shakespeare's engagement with natural philosophical discourse, this edition shapes the future of Shakespearean scholarship and pedagogy significantly, appealing to students entering the field and current scholars in interdisciplinary research on the topic alongside the non-professional reader seeking to understand Shakespeare's language and early modern scientific practices. Shakespeare's works respond to early modern culture's rapidly burgeoning interest in how new astronomical theories, understandings of motion and change, and the cataloging of objects, vegetation, and animals in the natural world could provide new knowledge. To cite a famous example, Hamlet's letter to Ophelia plays with the differences between the Ptolemaic and Copernican notions of the earth's movement: “Doubt that the sun doth move” may either be, in the Ptolemaic view, an earnest plea or, in the Copernican system, a purposeful equivocation. The Dictionary contextualizes such moments and scientific terms that Shakespeare employs, creatively and critically, throughout his poetry and drama. The focus is on Shakespeare's multiform uses of language, rendering accessible to students of Shakespeare such terms as “firmament,” “planetary influence,” and “retrograde.”

Performing Restoration Shakespeare
Performing Restoration Shakespeare

Author: Amanda Eubanks Winkler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-01-31

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1009241249

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Performing Restoration Shakespeare embraces the performative and musical qualities of Restoration Shakespeare (1660–1714), drawing on the expertise of theatre historians, musicologists, literary critics, and - importantly - theatre and music practitioners. The volume advances methodological debates in theatre studies and musicology by advocating an alternative to performance practices aimed at reviving 'original' styles or conventions, adopting a dialectical process that situates past performances within their historical and aesthetic contexts, and then using that understanding to transform them into new performances for new audiences. By deploying these methodologies, the volume invites scholars from different disciplines to understand Restoration Shakespeare on its own terms, discarding inhibiting preconceptions that Restoration Shakespeare debased Shakespeare's precursor texts. It also equips scholars and practitioners in theatre and music with new - and much needed - methods for studying and reviving past performances of any kind, not just Shakespearean ones.

Reading Robert Greene
Reading Robert Greene

Author: Darren Freebury-Jones

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-06-15

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1000594564

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Robert Greene holds a significant place in our understanding of Elizabethan literature. This book offers the most rigorous attempt yet undertaken to determine the scope of the playwright’s canon through analyses of Greene’s verse style, vocabulary, rhyming habits, and the dramatist’s phraseology in his attested plays and in comparison to four plays that have long been on the margins of Greene’s corpus: Locrine, Selimus, George a Greene, and A Knack to Know a Knave. The book defines the ranges for Greene’s stylistic habits for the very first time and proceeds to identify parallels of thought, language, and overall dramaturgy that reveal a single author’s creative consciousness. This volume also casts light on Greene as a more collaborative dramatist than has hitherto been acknowledged. Through emphasizing the immediate surroundings in which Greene was writing – the flourishing of popular theatres in two compact areas of London, in which each theatre company and their dra-matists kept a close eye on what their competitors were producing – Greene emerges as an influential playwright, whose restored oeuvre enables us to establish new ways in which his dramatic methods impacted other writers of the period, including Shakespeare.

Renaissance Dream Cultures
Renaissance Dream Cultures

Author: Alessandro Arcangeli

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-31

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1040108083

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This volume explores the dream cultures of the European long sixteenth century, with a focus on Italian sources, reflections and debates on the nature and value of dreams, and frameworks of interpretation. The chapters examine a variety of oneiric experiences, since distinctions such as that between dreams and visions are themselves culturally specific and variable. Several developments of the period are relevant and consequently considered, from the introduction of the printing press and the humanist rediscovery of ancient texts to the religious reforms and the cultural encounters at the time of the first globalisation. At the centre of the narrative is the exceptional case of Girolamo Cardano, heterodox physician, mathematician, astrologer, autobiographer, dreamer and key dream theorist of the epoch. The Italian peninsula produced the first printed editions of many classical and medieval treatises, and, particularly between the 1560s and the 1610s, was also especially active in the writing of texts, both Latin and vernacular, fascinated by the oneiric experience and investigating it. Given the role of the visual in dreaming, images are also analysed. This book will be a recommended reading for scholars, students and non-specialist readers of cultural history, Renaissance studies and dream cultures.

Shakespeare's borrowed feathers
Shakespeare's borrowed feathers

Author: Darren Freebury-Jones

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2024-10-08

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1526177315

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A fascinating book exploring the early modern authors who helped to shape Shakespeare’s beloved plays. Shakespeare’s plays have influenced generations of writers, but who were the early modern playwrights who influenced him? Using the latest techniques in textual analysis Shakespeare's borrowed feathers offers a fresh look at William Shakespeare and reveals the influence of a community of playwrights that shaped his work. This compelling book argues that we need to see early modern drama as a communal enterprise, with playwrights borrowing from and adapting one another's work. From John Lyly's wit to the collaborative genius of John Fletcher, to Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's borrowed feathers offers fresh insights into Shakespeare’s artistic development and shows us new ways of looking at the masterpieces that have enchanted audiences for centuries.

Office and Duty in King Lear
Office and Duty in King Lear

Author: Alexander Thom

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-12-25

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 3031401573

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This book advances five original readings of Shakespeare's King Lear, influenced by Giorgio Agamben, but tempered by primary research into Jacobean literature, law, religion, and philosophy. To grasp Lear’s encounter between politics and identity, the play demands a wider understanding of the religious influence on political thought. As Lear himself realises, sovereignty is an extreme, glamorous example of a deeper category: sacred office. Lear also shows duty intersecting with a hierarchy of bastards, outlaws, women, waifs, and monks. This book introduces concepts like petit treason, civil death, and waivery into political theological studies, complicating Agamben’s models. Goneril’s treason shows the sovereign’s consort and children are consecrated lives too. Lear’s crisis of "self-knowing" stages a landmark critique of office. The promise of his poignant speech before the prison is foreclosed by Shakespeare's invention: an officer dutifully murdering Cordelia. This book’s conclusion, through Hannah Arendt, reconsiders Lear’s persistent association with the Holocaust.

Shakespeare and Genre
Shakespeare and Genre

Author: A. Guneratne

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-01-02

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 1137010355

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Provides a comprehensive survey of approaches to genre in Shakespeare's work. Contributors probe deeply into genre theory and genre history by relating Renaissance conceptions. In this sense, the volume proposes to read Shakespeare through genre and, just as importantly, read genre through Shakespeare.