Shakespeare's Sceptered Isle
Shakespeare's Sceptered Isle

Author: Brian Carroll

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-05-18

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1476646759

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This work searches Shakespeare's history and Roman plays to find the raw materials of English national consciousness and identity. The messages of Shakespeare's history plays are not principally the plots or "facts" of the dramas but the attitudes and imaginings they elicited in audiences. Reading Shakespeare through the lens of national identity is a study almost as old as the plays themselves, and many scholars have found various articulations of nationhood in Shakespeare's plays. This book argues that Shakespeare's histories furnished modern England with a curriculum for constructing a national identity, a confidence of language and culture, and a powerful new medium through which to communicate and express this negotiated identity. Highlighting the application of semiotics, it studies the playwright's use of symbols, metonymy, symbolic codes, and metaphor. By examining what Shakespeare and playgoers remembered and forgot, as well as the ways ideas were framed, this book explores how a national identity was crafted, contested, and circulated.

Shakespeare's Sceptered Isle
Shakespeare's Sceptered Isle

Author: Brian Carroll

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-05-18

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1476685827

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This work searches Shakespeare's history and Roman plays to find the raw materials of English national consciousness and identity. The messages of Shakespeare's history plays are not principally the plots or "facts" of the dramas but the attitudes and imaginings they elicited in audiences. Reading Shakespeare through the lens of national identity is a study almost as old as the plays themselves, and many scholars have found various articulations of nationhood in Shakespeare's plays. This book argues that Shakespeare's histories furnished modern England with a curriculum for constructing a national identity, a confidence of language and culture, and a powerful new medium through which to communicate and express this negotiated identity. Highlighting the application of semiotics, it studies the playwright's use of symbols, metonymy, symbolic codes, and metaphor. By examining what Shakespeare and playgoers remembered and forgot, as well as the ways ideas were framed, this book explores how a national identity was crafted, contested, and circulated.

This Is Shakespeare
This Is Shakespeare

Author: Emma Smith

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1524748552

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An electrifying new study that investigates the challenges of the Bard’s inconsistencies and flaws, and focuses on revealing—not resolving—the ambiguities of the plays and their changing topicality A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn’t tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith—an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer—takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day), flirting with and skirting around the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex. Instead of offering the answers, the Shakespeare she reveals poses awkward questions, always inviting the reader to ponder ambiguities.

Shakespeare and National Culture
Shakespeare and National Culture

Author: John J. Joughin

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780719050510

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Shakespeare continues to feature in the construction and refashioning of national cultures and identities in a variety of forms. Often co-opted to serve nationalism, Shakespeare has also served to contest it in complex and contradictory ways.

Albion
Albion

Author: Peter Ackroyd

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 0307424650

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With his characteristic enthusiasm and erudition, Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: A Biography with an inspired look into the heart and the history of the English imagination. To tell the story of its evolution, Ackroyd ranges across literature and painting, philosophy and science, architecture and music, from Anglo-Saxon times to the twentieth-century. Considering what is most English about artists as diverse as Chaucer, William Hogarth, Benjamin Britten and Viriginia Woolf, Ackroyd identifies a host of sometimes contradictory elements: pragmatism and whimsy, blood and gore, a passion for the past, a delight in eccentricity, and much more. A brilliant, engaging and often surprising narrative, Albion reveals the manifold nature of English genius.

Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature
Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature

Author: Willy Maley

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-30

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1403990476

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This book, original in emphasis, daring in execution, maps out the shaping power of English Renaissance literature in creating and contesting national and colonial identities through the work of major canonical authors including Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton. Informed throughout by the burgeoning fields of the new British history and postcolonial criticism, this volume marks a dramatic shift in studies of the early modern period, from Irish to British concerns, thus accounting for the interplay of union, plantation, and conquest.

This Sceptred Isle
This Sceptred Isle

Author: Christopher Lee

Publisher: BBC Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13:

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The story of the British Empire is one of enormous personalities, adventure, scientific and maritime advancement, and the creation of one of the most complex international administrations the world has ever seen. This masterful work charts the history of exploration from the 16th century, but more importantly, from the mid-18th century to the period shortly before the First World War. It also looks at the immediate and long-range effects on the people themselves—the colonized and the colonizers—and why it all began to end when it did.