The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare's Stratford
The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare's Stratford

Author: J.R. Mulryne

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1317029658

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The guild buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford represent a rare instance of a largely unchanged set of buildings which draw together the threads of the town’s civic life. With its multi-disciplinary perspectives on this remarkable group of buildings, this volume provides a comprehensive account of the religious, educational, legal, social and theatrical history of Stratford, focusing on the sixteenth century and Tudor Reformation. The essays interweave with one another to provide a map of the complex relationships between the buildings and their history. Opening with an investigation of the Guildhall, which served as the headquarters of the Guild of the Holy Cross until the Tudor Reformation, the book explores the building’s function as a centre of local government and community law and as a place of entertainment and education. It is beyond serious doubt that Shakespeare was a school boy here, and the many visits to the Guildhall by professional touring players during the latter half of the sixteenth-century may have prompted his acting and playwriting career. The Guildhall continues to this day to house a school for the education of secondary-level boys. The book considers educational provision during the mid sixteenth century as well as examining the interaction between touring players and the everyday politics and social life of Stratford. At the heart of the volume is archaeological and documentary research which uses up-to-date analysis and new dendrochronological investigations to interpret the buildings and their medieval wall paintings as well as proposing a possible location of the school before it transferred to the Guildhall. Together with extensive archival research into the town’s Court of Record which throws light on the commercial and social activities of the period, this rich body of research brings us closer to life as it was lived in Shakespeare’s Stratford.

The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare's Stratford
The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare's Stratford

Author: Professor J R Mulryne

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-02-28

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 1409473155

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The guild buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford represent a rare instance of a largely unchanged set of buildings which draw together the threads of the town’s civic life. With its multi-disciplinary perspectives on this remarkable group of buildings, this volume provides a comprehensive account of the religious, educational, legal, social and theatrical history of Stratford, focusing on the sixteenth century and Tudor Reformation. The essays interweave with one another to provide a map of the complex relationships between the buildings and their history. Opening with an investigation of the Guildhall, which served as the headquarters of the Guild of the Holy Cross until the Tudor Reformation, the book explores the building’s function as a centre of local government and community law and as a place of entertainment and education. It is beyond serious doubt that Shakespeare was a school boy here, and the many visits to the Guildhall by professional touring players during the latter half of the sixteenth-century may have prompted his acting and playwriting career. The Guildhall continues to this day to house a school for the education of secondary-level boys. The book considers educational provision during the mid sixteenth century as well as examining the interaction between touring players and the everyday politics and social life of Stratford. At the heart of the volume is archaeological and documentary research which uses up-to-date analysis and new dendrochronological investigations to interpret the buildings and their medieval wall paintings as well as proposing a possible location of the school before it transferred to the Guildhall. Together with extensive archival research into the town’s Court of Record which throws light on the commercial and social activities of the period, this rich body of research brings us closer to life as it was lived in Shakespeare’s Stratford.

Finding Shakespeare's New Place
Finding Shakespeare's New Place

Author: Paul Edmondson

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-09-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1526106515

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This ground-breaking book provides an abundance of fresh insights into Shakespeare's life in relation to his lost family home, New Place. The findings of a major archaeological excavation encourage us to think again about what New Place meant to Shakespeare and, in so doing, challenge some of the long-held assumptions of Shakespearian biography. New Place was the largest house in the borough and the only one with a courtyard. Shakespeare was only ever an intermittent lodger in London. His impressive home gave Shakespeare significant social status and was crucial to his relationship with Stratford-upon-Avon. Archaeology helps to inform biography in this innovative and refreshing study which presents an overview of the site from prehistoric times through to a richly nuanced reconstruction of New Place when Shakespeare and his family lived there, and beyond. This attractively illustrated book is for anyone with a passion for archaeology or Shakespeare.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English
The Oxford History of Poetry in English

Author: Julia Boffey

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-04-12

Total Pages: 593

ISBN-13: 0198878516

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume explores the developing range of English verse in the century after the death of Chaucer in 1400, years that saw both change and consolidation in traditions of poetic writing in English in the regions of Britain. Chaucer himself was an important shaping presence in the poetry of this period, providing a stimulus to imitation and to creative expansion of the modes he had favoured. In addition to assessing his role, this volume considers a range of literary factors significant to the poetry of the century, including verse forms, literary language, translation, and the idea of the author. It also signals features of the century's history that were important for the production of English verse: responses to wars at home and abroad, dynastic uncertainty, and movements towards religious reform, as well as technological innovations such as the introduction of printing, which brought influential changes to the transmission and reception of verse writing. The volume is shaped to include chapters on the contexts and forms of poetry in English, on the important genres of verse produced in the period, on some of the fifteenth-century's major writers (Lydgate, Hoccleve, Dunbar, and Henryson), and a consideration of the influence of the verse of this century on what was to follow.

Shakespeare's Money
Shakespeare's Money

Author: Robert Bearman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 019875924X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shakespeare's Money explores what archival records can reveal about Shakespeare's economic and social success, shedding light on how he elevated his family from lowly status to minor gentry and how economic concerns were ever present in his daily life.

Shakespeare and Complexity Theory
Shakespeare and Complexity Theory

Author: Claire Hansen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-06-27

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1315265524

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shakespeare and Complexity Theory is the first book-length examination into how complexity theory may be incorporated within Shakespeare studies. The book demonstrates how complexity theory can illuminate our understanding of Shakespeare’s texts, early modern theatrical practices (from dance to co-authorship to stagecraft), pedagogy, and Shakespeare’s canonical place in contemporary culture. In its implementation of a scientific framework, this monograph taps into an area of increasing academic and research interest: the relationship between the sciences and the humanities.

The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages
The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages

Author: Gervase Rosser

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0198201575

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Explores the motives and experiences of the medieval men and women who joined together in guilds, family-like societies that affected most aspects of their members' lives.

Shakespeare Before Shakespeare
Shakespeare Before Shakespeare

Author: Glyn Parry

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-08-06

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0192607863

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Before William Shakespeare wrote world-famous plays on the themes of power and political turmoil, the Shakespeare family of Stratford-upon-Avon and their neighbors and friends were plagued by false accusations and feuds with the government — conflicts that shaped Shakespeare's sceptical understanding of the realities of power. This ground-breaking study of the world of the young William Shakespeare in Stratford and Warwickshire discusses many recent archival discoveries to consider three linked families, the Shakespeares, the Dudleys, and the Ardens, and their battles over regional power and government corruption. Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and Ambrose Dudley, earl of Warwick, used politics, the law, history, and lineage to establish their authority in Warwickshire and Stratford, challenging political and social structures and collective memory in the region. The resistance of Edward Arden — often claimed as kin to Mary Arden, Shakespeare's mother — and his friends and family culminated in his execution on false treason charges in 1583. By then the Shakespeare family also had direct experience with the London government's power: in 1569, Exchequer informers, backed by influential politicians at Court, accused John Shakespeare, William's father, of illegal wool- dealing and usury. Despite previous claims that John had resolved these charges by 1572, the book's new sources show the Exchequer's continuing demands forced his withdrawal from Stratford politics by 1577, and undermined his business career in the early 1580s, when young William first gained an understanding of his father's troubles. At the same time, Edward Arden's condemnation by the Elizabethan regime proved problematic for the Shakespeares' friends and neighbours, the Quineys, who were accused of maintaining financial connections to the traitorous Ardens — though Stratford people were convinced of their innocence. This complicated community directly impacted Shakespeare's own perspective on local and national politics and social structures, connecting his early experiences in Stratford and Warwickshire with many of the themes later found in his plays.

Heterodox Shakespeare
Heterodox Shakespeare

Author: Sean Benson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-02-09

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1683930266

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The last quarter century has seen a “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies as well as competing assertions by secular critics that Shakespeare’s plays reflect profound skepticism and even dismissal of the truth claims of revealed religion. This divide, though real, obscures the fact that Shakespeare often embeds both readings within the same play. This book is the first to propose an accommodation between religious and secular readings of the plays. Benson argues that Shakespeare was neither a mere debunker of religious orthodoxies nor their unquestioning champion. Religious inquiry in his plays is capacious enough to explore religious orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, everything from radical belief and the need to tolerate religious dissent to the possibility of God’s nonexistence. Shakespeare’s willingness to explore all aspects of religious and secular life, often simultaneously, is a mark of his tremendous intellectual range. Taking the heterodox as his focus, Benson examines five figures and ideas on the margins of the post-Reformation English church: nonconforming puritans such as Malvolio as well as physical revenants—the walking dead—whom Shakespeare alludes to and features so tantalizingly in Hamlet. Benson applies what Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—his ability to treat both sides of an issue equally and without prejudice—to show that Shakespeare considers possible worlds where God is intimately involved in the lives of persons and, in the very same play, a world in which God may not even exist. Benson demonstrates both that the range of Shakespeare’s investigation of religious questions is more daring than has previously been thought, and that the distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the orthodox and the unorthodox, is one that Shakespeare continually engages.

The Private Life of William Shakespeare
The Private Life of William Shakespeare

Author: Lena Cowen Orlin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 019266140X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A new biography of William Shakespeare that explores his private life in Stratford-upon-Avon, his personal aspirations, his self-determination, and his relations with the members of his family and his neighbours. The Private Life of William Shakespeare tells the story of Shakespeare in Stratford as a family man. The book offers close readings of key documents associated with Shakespeare and develops a contextual understanding of the genres from which these documents emerge. It reconsiders clusters of evidence that have been held to prove some persistent biographical fables. It also shows how the histories of some of Shakespeare's neighbours illuminate aspects of his own life. Throughout, we encounter a Shakespeare who consciously and with purpose designed his life. Having witnessed the business failures of his merchant father, he determined not to follow his father's model. His early wedding freed him from craft training to pursue a literary career. His wife's work, and probably the assistance of his parents and brothers, enabled him to make the first of the property purchases that grounded his life as a gentleman. With his will, he provided for both his daughters in ways that were suitable to their circumstances; Anne Shakespeare was already protected by dower rights in the houses and lands he had acquired. His funerary monument suggests that the man of 'small Latin and less Greek' in fact had some experience of an Oxford education. Evidences are that he commissioned the monument himself.