Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages

Author: Alfred Thomas

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-06-18

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 3319902180

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.


Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare and the Middle Ages

Author: Martha W. Driver

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0786491655

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's 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.


Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance

Author: Velma Bourgeois Richmond

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-12-17

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1474247490

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book assesses William Shakespeare in the context of political and religious crisis, paying particular attention to his Catholic connections, which have heretofore been underplayed by much Protestant interpretation. Bourgeois Richmond's most important contribution is to study the genre of romance in its guise as a 'cover' for recusant Catholicism, drawing on a long tradition of medieval-religious plays devoted to the propagation of Catholic religious faith.


Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives

Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives

Author: Paul Franssen

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2020-04-09

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1789206898

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

New Shakespeare biographies are published every year, though very little new documentary evidence has come to light. Inevitably speculative, these biographies straddle the line between fact and fiction. Shakespeare and His Biographical Afterlives explores the relationship between fiction and non-fiction within Shakespeare’s biography, across a range of subjects including feminism, class politics, wartime propaganda, children’s fiction, and religion, expanding beyond the Anglophone world to include countries such as Germany and Spain, from the seventeenth century to present day.


Medieval Shakespeare

Medieval Shakespeare

Author: Ruth Morse

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-02-07

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1107016274

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book gives readers the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare from the perspectives of the late-medieval European traditions that surrounded him.


Shakespeare and Biography

Shakespeare and Biography

Author: Katherine Scheil

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2020-09-23

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1789209056

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From Shakespeare’s religion to his wife to his competitors in the world of early modern theatre, biographers have approached the question of the Bard’s life from numerous angles. Shakespeare & Biography offers a fresh look at the biographical questions connected with the famous playwright’s life, through essays and reflections written by prominent international scholars and biographers.


Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation

Author: Dennis Taylor

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-07-18

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1666902098

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference explores how Shakespeare’s plays dramatize key issues of the Elizabethan Reformation, the conflict between the sacred, the critical, and the disenchanted; alternatively, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the secular. Each play imagines their reconciliation or the failure of reconcilation. The Catholic sacred is shadowed by its degeneration into superstition, Protestant critique by its unintended (fissaparous) consequences, the secular ordinary by stark disenchantment. Shakespeare shows how all three perspectives are needed if society is to face its intractable problems, thus providing a powerful model for our own ecumenical dialogues. Shakespeare begins with history plays contrasting the saintly but impractical King Henry VI, whose assassination is the ”primal crime,” with the pragmatic and secular Henry IV, until imagining in the later 1590’s how Hal can reconnect with sacred sources. At the same time in his comedies, Shakespeare imagines cooperative ways of resolving the national ”comedy of errors,” of sorting out erotic and marital and contemplative confusions by applying his triple lens. His late Elizabethan comedies achieve a polished balance of wit and devotion, ordinary and the sacred, old and new orders. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ultimate Elizabethan consideration of these issues, its so-called lack of objective correlation a response to the unsorted trauma of the Reformation.


Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Author: Dominic Janes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1351874039

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Walsingham was medieval England's most important shrine to the Virgin Mary and a popular pilgrimage site. Following its modern revival it is also well known today. For nearly a thousand years, it has been the subject of, or referred to in, music, poetry and novels (by for instance Langland, Erasmus, Sidney, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Eliot and Lowell). But only in the last twenty years or so has it received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader cultural significance. Contributors to this book focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and sociological significance that Walsingham has had for over six hundred years. The collection's essays consider connections between landscape and the sacred, the body and sexuality and Walsingham's place in literature, music and, more broadly, especially since the Reformation, in the construction of cultural memory. The historical range of the essays includes Walsingham's rise to prominence in the later Middle Ages, its destruction during the English Reformation, and the presence of uncanny echoes and traces in early modern English culture, including poems, ballads, music and some of the plays of Shakespeare. Contributions also examine the cultural dynamics of the remarkable revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage and as a cultural icon in the Victorian and modern periods. Hitherto, scholarship on Walsingham has been almost entirely confined to the history of religion. In contrast, contributors to this volume include internationally known scholars from literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, anthropology and musicology as well as theology.