The Dutch Courtesan
The Dutch Courtesan

Author: John Marston

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-04-05

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1472568974

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The Dutch Courtesan is a riotous tragicomedy that explores the delights and perils afforded by Jacobean London. While Freevill, an educated young Englishman and the play's nominal hero, frolics in the city's streets, taverns and brothels, Franceschina, his cast-off mistress and the Dutch courtesan of the play's title,laments his betrayal and plots revenge. Juxtaposing Franceschina's vulnerable financial position against the unappealing marital prospects available to gentry women, the play undermines the language of romance, revealing it to be rooted in the commerce and commodification. Marston's commentary on financial insecurity and the hypocritical repudiation of foreignness makes The Dutch Courtesan truly a document for our time.

The Dutch Courtesan
The Dutch Courtesan

Author: John Marston

Publisher: Lincoln, U. of Nebraska P

Published: 1965

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9780835779333

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Although it was written shortly before or after Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603 and performed by the boy company at Blackfriars, this play foreshadows the light ladies and callous gallants of Restoration comedy. Passion is a scourge, love is humiliation, and friends might as well be enemies. Freevill discards his concubine Franceschina and, for a joke, sets his straight-laced friend Malheureux on to her, who falls for her and promises to carry out her revenge on Freevill by killing him. The play in the theatre, which is fully imagined in the introduction to this edition, impresses on the audience the spuriousness of rigid moral persuasions, especially when they are tried by fits of sexual passion.

Renaissance Drama
Renaissance Drama

Author: Sandra Clark

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2007-11-19

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0745633102

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This work provides a comprehensive overview of one of the richest periods of theatre history - the drama of early modern England.

Montaigne's English Journey
Montaigne's English Journey

Author: William M. Hamlin

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-11-14

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0191507024

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Montaigne's English Journey examines the genesis, early readership, and multifaceted impact of John Florio's exuberant translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays. Published in London in 1603, this book was widely read in seventeenth-century England: Shakespeare borrowed from it as he drafted King Lear and The Tempest, and many hundreds of English men and women first encountered Montaigne's tolerant outlook and disarming candour in its densely-printed pages. Literary historians have long been fascinated by the influence of Florio's translation, analysing its contributions to the development of the English essay and tracing its appropriation in the work of Webster, Dryden, and other major writers. William M. Hamlin, by contrast, undertakes an exploration of Florio's Montaigne within the overlapping realms of print and manuscript culture, assessing its importance from the varied perspectives of its earliest English readers. Drawing on letters, diaries, commonplace books, and thousands of marginal annotations inscribed in surviving copies of Florio's volume, Hamlin offers a comprehensive account of the transmission and reception of Montaigne in seventeenth-century England. In particular he focuses on topics that consistently intrigued Montaigne's English readers: sexuality, marriage, conscience, theatricality, scepticism, self-presentation, the nature of wisdom, and the power of custom. All in all, Hamlin's study constitutes a major contribution to investigations of literary readership in pre-Enlightenment Europe.

Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature
Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Lesel Dawson

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2008-09-18

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0191556092

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In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical etiologies and cures. Lesel Dawson analyzes literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. She explores the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and greensickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. Finally, she examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy and considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness. With reference to the works of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Ford, and Davenant, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature investigates how early modern representations of lovesickness expose contemporary cultural constructions of love, revealing the relation of sexuality to spirituality and the creation and shattering of the impassioned subject. It offers an important contribution to the history of romantic love and will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, gender, and medical history.