Religion Around Shakespeare

Religion Around Shakespeare

Author: Peter Iver Kaufman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-26

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0271069589

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.


A Will to Believe

A Will to Believe

Author: David Scott Kastan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0199572895

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Will to Believe is a revised version of Kastan's 2008 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, providing a provocative account of the ways in which religion animates Shakespeare's plays.


The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion

Author: Hannibal Hamlin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1107172594

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A wide-ranging yet accessible investigation into the importance of religion in Shakespeare's works, from a team of eminent international scholars.


Shakespeare's Christianity

Shakespeare's Christianity

Author: E. Beatrice Batson

Publisher: Baylor University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1932792368

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume explores the influences of Catholicism and Protestantism in a trio of Shakespeare's tragedies: Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Bypassing the discussion of Shakespeare's personal religious beliefs, Batson instead focuses on distinct footprints left by Catholic and Protestant traditions that underlie and inform Shakespeare's artistic genius.


Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England

Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England

Author: Dennis Taylor

Publisher: Studies in Religion and Litera

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The question of Shakespeare's Catholic contexts has occupied many scholars in recent years and this study brings together 16 original essays examining Shakespeare's work in the light of revisionist scholarship, from monastic life in 'Measure for Measure' to Puritanism in 'Hamlet'.


Religion in the Age of Shakespeare

Religion in the Age of Shakespeare

Author: Christopher Baker

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 2007-09-30

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shakespeare's plays were the product of his culture and reflect the daily life of Elizabethans. This book examines the religious background of his works and helps students use his plays to understand religion in Elizabethan England. The initial chapters survey the role of religion in Shakespeare's world. The volume then looks at religion in his plays and how productions from different periods have addressed the religious issues of his drama. A chapter then overviews criticism on Shakespeare and religion, while a selection of primary documents illuminates his religious milieu. Students often find the Elizabethan world fascinating yet challenging. The same can be said of Shakespeare's plays, which reflect the daily life and concerns of Elizabethan England and grew out of his milieu. Written for students, this book illuminates the religious life of Elizabethan England, promotes a greater understanding of Shakespeare's plays, and uses Shakespeare's works to examine Early Modern religious culture. The volume begins with a quick overview of the origins of Elizabethan religious traditions, followed by a more detailed consideration of the chief religious beliefs and concerns of Shakespeare's world. It then discusses the role of religion in Shakespeare's plays. This is followed by a look at how various productions have interpreted his religious concerns. A review of criticism on Shakespeare and religion follows, along with a selection of primary documents related to religion in his world. A glossary defines key terms and concepts, and a bibliography cites print and electronic resources for further study. Literature students will welcome this book as a guide to Shakespeare's plays, while history students will value it for using his plays to examine religion in the Early Modern era.


Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton

Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton

Author: Kristen Poole

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-03-30

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780521025447

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The figure of the puritan has long been conceived as dour and repressive in character, an image which has been central to ways of reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history and literature. Kristen Poole's original study challenges this perception arguing that, contrary to current critical understanding, radical reformers were most often portrayed in literature of the period as deviant, licentious and transgressive. Through extensive analysis of early modern pamphlets, sermons, poetry and plays, the fictional puritan emerges as a grotesque and carnivalesque figure; puritans are extensively depicted as gluttonous, sexually promiscuous, monstrously procreating, and even as worshipping naked. By recovering this lost alternative satirical image, Poole sheds new light on the role played by anti-puritan rhetoric. Her book contends that such representations served an important social role, providing an imaginative framework for discussing familial, communal and political transformations that resulted from the Reformation.


Texts and Traditions

Texts and Traditions

Author: Beatrice Groves

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2006-11-30

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0191514144

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Texts and Traditions explores Shakespeare's thoroughgoing engagement with the religious culture of his time. In the wake of the recent resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's Catholicism, Groves eschews a reductively biographical approach and considers instead the ways in which Shakespeare's borrowing from both the visual culture of Catholicism and the linguistic wealth of the Protestant English Bible enriched his drama. Through close readings of a number of plays - Romeo and Juliet, King John, 1 Henry IV, Henry V ,and Measure for Measure - Groves unearths and explains previously unrecognised allusions to the Bible, the Church's liturgy, and to the mystery plays performed in England in Shakespeare's boyhood. Texts and Traditions provides new evidence of the way in which Shakespeare exploited his audience's cultural memory and biblical knowledge in order to enrich his ostensibly secular drama and argues that we need to unravel the interpretative possibilities of these religious nuances in order fully to grasp the implications of his plays.


Mortal Thoughts

Mortal Thoughts

Author: Brian Cummings

Publisher:

Published: 2013-08-22

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0199677719

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mortal Thoughts is a study of the question of human identity in the early modern period. It examines literature alongside emerging forms of life writing and life drawing and self-portraits and considers portrayals of mortality and the moment of death.