Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton
Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton

Author: Thomas P. Anderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1351912135

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An examination of political and cultural acts of commemoration, this study addresses the way personal and collective loss is registered in prose, poetry and drama in early modern England. It focuses on the connection of representation of violence in literary works to historical traumas such as royal death, secularization and regicide. The author contends that dramatic and poetic forms function as historical archives both in their commemoration of the past and in their reenactment of loss that is part of any effort to represent traumatic history. Incorporating contemporary theories of memory and loss, Thomas Anderson here analyzes works by Shakepeare, Marlowe, Webster, Marvell and Milton. Where other studies about violent loss in the period tend to privilege allegorical readings that equate the content of art to its historical analogue, this study insists that artistic representations are performative as they commemorate the past. By interrogating the difficulty in representing historical crises in poetry, drama and political prose, Anderson demonstrates how early modern English identity is the fragile product of an ambivalent desire to flee history. This book's major contribution to Renaissance studies lies in the way it conceives the representations of violent loss-secular and religious-in early modern texts as moments of failed political and social memorialization. It offers a fresh way to understand the development of historical and national identity in England during the Renaissance.

Early Modern Trauma
Early Modern Trauma

Author: Erin Peters

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-08

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 1496208919

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This edited collection explores what trauma—seen through an analytical lens—can reveal about the early modern period and, conversely, what conceptualizations of psychological trauma from the period can tell us about trauma theory itself.

Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare's Roman Poems and Plays
Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare's Roman Poems and Plays

Author: L. Starks-Estes

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-07-08

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1137349921

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Employing psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and materialist perspectives, this book examines Shakespeare's appropriations of Ovid's poetry in his Roman poems and plays. It argues that Shakespeare uses Ovid to explore violence, trauma, and virtus - the traumatic effects of aggression, sadomasochism, and the shifting notions of selfhood and masculinity.

Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance
Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance

Author: Catherine Silverstone

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-02-06

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1135178305

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Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance examines how contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s texts on stage and screen engage with violent events and histories. The book attempts to account for – but not to rationalize – the ongoing and pernicious effects of various forms of violence as they have emerged in selected contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s texts, especially as that violence relates to apartheid, colonization, racism, homophobia and war. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies, which are informed by debates in Shakespeare, trauma and performance studies and developed from extensive archival research, the book examines how performances and their documentary traces work variously to memorialize, remember and witness violent events and histories. In the process, Silverstone considers the ethical and political implications of attempts to represent trauma in performance, especially in relation to performing, spectatorship and community formation. Ranging from the mainstream to the fringe, key performances discussed include Gregory Doran’s Titus Andronicus (1995) for Johannesburg’s Market Theatre; Don C. Selwyn’s New Zealand-made film, The Maori Merchant of Venice (2001); Philip Osment’s appropriation of The Tempest in This Island’s Mine for London’s Gay Sweatshop (1988); and Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (2003) for the National Theatre in London.

Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts
Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts

Author: Hilary Powell

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-12-11

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 3030526593

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This book examines how the experiences of hearing voices and seeing visions were understood within the cultural, literary, and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. In the Middle Ages, these experiences were interpreted according to frameworks that could credit visionaries or voice-hearers with spiritual knowledge, and allow them to inhabit social roles that were as much desired as feared. Voice-hearing and visionary experience offered powerful creative possibilities in imaginative literature and were often central to the writing of inner, spiritual lives. Ideas about such experience were taken up and reshaped in response to the cultural shifts of the early modern period. These essays, which consider the period 1100 to 1700, offer diverse new insights into a complex, controversial, and contested category of human experience, exploring literary and spiritual works as illuminated by scientific and medical writings, natural philosophy and theology, and the visual arts. In extending and challenging contemporary bio-medical perspectives through the insights and methodologies of the arts and humanities, the volume offers a timely intervention within the wider project of the medical humanities. Chapters 2 and 5 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater
Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater

Author: Sara Morrison

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1317050746

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Offering the first sustained and comprehensive scholarly consideration of the dramatic potential of the blazon, this volume complicates what has become a standard reading of the Petrarchan convention of dismembering the beloved through poetic description. At the same time, it contributes to a growing understanding of the relationship between the material conditions of theater and interpretations of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The chapters in this collection are organized into five thematic parts emphasizing the conventions of theater that compel us to consider bodies as both literally present and figuratively represented through languge. The first part addresses the dramatic blazon as used within the conventions of courtly love. Examining the classical roots of the Petrarchan blazon, the next part explores the violent eroticism of a poetic technique rooted in Ovidian notions of metamorphosis. With similar attention paid to brutality, the third part analyzes the representation of blazonic dismemberment on stage and screen. Figurative battles become real in the fourth part, which addresses the frequent blazons surfacing in historical and political plays. The final part moves to the role of audience, analyzing the role of the observer in containing the identity of the blazoned woman as well as her attempts to resist becoming an objectified spectacle.

New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare
New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare

Author: James Newlin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-14

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1000910199

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It has been over two decades since the publication of the last major edited collection focused on psychoanalysis and early modern culture. In Shakespeare studies, the New Historicism and cognitive psychology have hindered a dynamic conversation engaging depth-oriented models of the mind from taking place. The essays in New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains seek to redress this situation, by engaging a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic theory and criticism, from Freud to the present, to read individual plays closely. These essays show how psychoanalytic theory helps us to rethink the plays’ history of performance; their treatment of gender, sexuality, and race; their view of history and trauma; and the ways in which they anticipate contemporary psychodynamic treatment. Far from simply calling for a conventional "return to Freud," the essays collected here initiate an exciting conversation between Shakespeare studies and psychoanalysis in the hopes of radically transforming both disciplines. It is time to listen, once again, to seething brains.

Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England
Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England

Author: Jonathan Baldo

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-30

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1316517691

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The first book to systematically combine the two vibrant yet hitherto unconnected fields of memory and affect in Shakespeare's England.

Staging Pain, 1580-1800
Staging Pain, 1580-1800

Author: James Robert Allard

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780754667582

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This collection foregrounds two crucial moments in the histories of pain, trauma, and their staging in British Theater: the establishment of secular and professional theater in London in the 1580s, and the growing dissatisfaction with theatrical modes of public punishment by 1800. Whether focused on individual plays or broad concerns, these essays offer a new and important contribution to the increasingly interrelated histories of pain, the body, and the theater.

Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature
Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Jennifer Feather

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-12-22

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 113701041X

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By examining these competing depictions of combat that coexist in sixteenth-century texts ranging from Arthurian romance to early modern medical texts, this study reveals both the importance of combat in understanding the humanist subject and the contours of the previously neglected pre-modern subject.