Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England
Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England

Author: Alex MacConochie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-27

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0192857363

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When Shakespearean characters kiss, embrace, or shake hands, what does it mean? Are dramatic characters following established rules of conduct, or breaking them? Are there rules to break? Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England addresses these and related questions and, in the process, uncovers the social semiotics of contact in the early modern theatre. Its central argument is twofold. First, dramatic characters use touch to define and contest the nature of their relationships: taking hands means something different than embracing or, indeed, holding hands a different way. Second, the definitions, the social roles of actions like these, are up for debate in venues ranging from sermons to the era's burgeoning literature on conduct. The drama not only portrays but participates in these debates. Where characters touch, so do different ideas about contact's role in a variety of contexts, from love and friendship to politics and business deals. Attending to the social roles of touch--what it signifies as much as how it feels--the book develops an outside-in approach to our understanding of early modern sensation: a sociology, rather than a phenomenology, of theatrical contact. It will be of use to editors, performers, and anyone interested in Shakespearean approaches to embodiment. Locating interpersonal touch at the centre of dialogues on consent, subjection, agency, and sexuality, this study offers new perspectives on an essential element of Renaissance drama.

Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England
Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England

Author: Alex MacConochie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-13

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0192671782

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When Shakespearean characters kiss, embrace, or shake hands, what does it mean? Are dramatic characters following established rules of conduct, or breaking them? Are there rules to break? Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England addresses these and related questions and, in the process, uncovers the social semiotics of contact in the early modern theatre. Its central argument is twofold. First, dramatic characters use touch to define and contest the nature of their relationships: taking hands means something different than embracing or, indeed, holding hands a different way. Second, the definitions, the social roles of actions like these, are up for debate in venues ranging from sermons to the era's burgeoning literature on conduct. The drama not only portrays but participates in these debates. Where characters touch, so do different ideas about contact's role in a variety of contexts, from love and friendship to politics and business deals. Attending to the social roles of touch—what it signifies as much as how it feels—the book develops an outside-in approach to our understanding of early modern sensation: a sociology, rather than a phenomenology, of theatrical contact. It will be of use to editors, performers, and anyone interested in Shakespearean approaches to embodiment. Locating interpersonal touch at the centre of dialogues on consent, subjection, agency, and sexuality, this study offers new perspectives on an essential element of Renaissance drama.

Shakespeare Studies
Shakespeare Studies

Author: James R. Siemon

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-03-06

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1683933915

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Shakespeare Studies is an annual peer-reviewed volume featuring the work of performance scholars, literary critics and cultural historians. The journal focuses primarily on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but embraces theoretical and historical studies of socio-political, intellectual and artistic contexts that extend well beyond the early modern English theatrical milieu. In addition to articles, Shakespeare Studies offers opportunities for extended intellectual exchange through its thematically-focused forums, and includes substantial reviews. An international Editorial Board maintains the quality of each volume so that Shakespeare Studies may serve as a reliable resource for all students of Shakespeare and the early modern period – for research scholars and also for teachers, actors and directors. Volume 51 includes a Forum on the work of Michael D Bristol, with contributions from J. F. Bernard, Gail Kern Paster, James Siemon, Jill Ingram, Unhae Park Langis and Julia Reinhard Lupton, Anna Lewton-Brain and Brooke Harvey, Nicholas Utzig, and Paul Yachnin. Volume 51 includes articles from the Next Generation Plenary of the Shakespeare Association of America and essays by Laurence Senelick ("A Gift to Anti-Semites: Shylock on the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Stage"), Christopher D'Addario ("Metatheater and the Urban Everyday in Ben Jonson's Epicoene and The Alchemist"), and Denise A. Walen ("Elbowing Katherine of Valois"). Book reviews consider eleven important publications on liberty of speech and female voice; theaters of catastrophe; adaptations of Macbeth; staging touch in Shakespeare's England; the criticism of Hugh Grady; Shakespeare and World War II film; Shakespeare and digital pedagogy; Shakespeare and forgetting; Shakespeare and disability studies, and Shakespeare's private life.

Literature and the Senses
Literature and the Senses

Author: Annette Kern-Stähler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-07-06

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 019265747X

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means by which literary texts engage with, open up, or make uncertain dominant views of the nature of perception. Considering the ways in which literary texts intersect with and diverge from scientific, epistemological, and philosophical perspectives, these essays explore a wide variety of literary moments of sensation including: the interspecies exchange of a look between a swan and a young Indigenous Australian girl; the sound of bees as captured in an early modern poem; the noxious smell of the 'Great Stink' that recurs in the Victorian novel; the taste of an eggplant registered in a poetic performance; tactile gestures in medieval romance; and the representation of a world in which the interdependence of human beings with the purple hibiscus plant is experienced through all five senses. The collection builds upon and breaks new ground in the field of sensory studies, focusing on what makes literature especially suitable to engaging with, contributing to, and challenging our perennial understandings of, the senses.

Shakespeare Survey 76
Shakespeare Survey 76

Author: Emma Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-08-31

Total Pages: 941

ISBN-13: 1009392778

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Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 76 is 'Digital and Virtual Shakespeare'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/publications/collections/cambridge-shakespeare. This searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage
The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage

Author: Farah Karim Cooper

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-04-21

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1474234275

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This ground-breaking new book uncovers the way Shakespeare draws upon the available literature and visual representations of the hand to inform his drama. Providing an analysis of gesture, touch, skill and dismemberment in a range of Shakespeare's works, it shows how the hand was perceived in Shakespeare's time as an indicator of human agency, emotion, social and personal identity. It demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.

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:

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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.

The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus
The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus

Author: William Shakespeare

Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand

Published: 2024-04-01

Total Pages: 127

ISBN-13:

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"The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus" by William Shakespeare is a gripping and intense drama that explores themes of revenge, betrayal, and the destructive consequences of violence. Set in ancient Rome, the play follows the tragic downfall of the noble general Titus Andronicus and his family as they become embroiled in a cycle of vengeance and bloodshed. At the heart of the story is the brutal conflict between Titus Andronicus and Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose sons are executed by Titus as retribution for their crimes. In retaliation, Tamora and her lover, Aaron the Moor, orchestrate a series of heinous acts of revenge against Titus and his family, plunging them into a spiral of madness and despair. As the body count rises and the atrocities escalate, Titus is consumed by grief and rage, leading to a climactic showdown that culminates in a shocking and tragic conclusion. Along the way, Shakespeare explores themes of honor, justice, and the nature of humanity, offering a searing indictment of the cycle of violence and the capacity for cruelty that lies within us all.

Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance
Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance

Author: Farah Karim Cooper

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-01-05

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1408157055

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How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.