The exciting tie-in to the major new series on Radio 4, written and presented by one of the UK’s leading commentators on social and political life - Jim Naughtie.
In this Elizabethan exploration, Wilson follows the stories of privateer Francis Drake, political intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham; and Renaissance literary geniuses from Sir Philip Sidney to Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.
In the first half of the twentieth century, many writers and artists turnedto the art and received example of the Elizabethans as a means ofarticulating an emphatic (and anti-Victorian) modernity. By the middleof that century, this cultural neo-Elizabethanism had become absorbedwithin a broader mainstream discourse of national identity, heritage andcultural performance. Taking strength from the Coronation of a new, youngQueen named Elizabeth, the New Elizabethanism of the 1950s heralded anation that would now see its 'modern', televised monarch preside over animminently glorious and artistic age.This book provides the first in-depth investigation of New Elizabethanismand its legacy. With contributions from leading cultural practitioners andscholars, its essays explore New Elizabethanism as variously manifestin ballet and opera, the Coronation broadcast and festivities, nationalhistoriography and myth, the idea of the 'Young Elizabethan', celebrations ofair travel and new technologies, and the New Shakespeareanism of theatreand television. As these essays expose, New Elizabethanism was muchmore than a brief moment of optimistic hyperbole. Indeed, from moderndrama and film to the reinternment of Richard III, from the London Olympicsto the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, it continues to pervade contemporaryartistic expression, politics, and key moments of national pageantry.
In the first half of the twentieth century, many writers and artists turnedto the art and received example of the Elizabethans as a means ofarticulating an emphatic (and anti-Victorian) modernity. By the middleof that century, this cultural neo-Elizabethanism had become absorbedwithin a broader mainstream discourse of national identity, heritage andcultural performance. Taking strength from the Coronation of a new, youngQueen named Elizabeth, the New Elizabethanism of the 1950s heralded anation that would now see its 'modern', televised monarch preside over animminently glorious and artistic age.This book provides the first in-depth investigation of New Elizabethanismand its legacy. With contributions from leading cultural practitioners andscholars, its essays explore New Elizabethanism as variously manifestin ballet and opera, the Coronation broadcast and festivities, nationalhistoriography and myth, the idea of the 'Young Elizabethan', celebrations ofair travel and new technologies, and the New Shakespeareanism of theatreand television. As these essays expose, New Elizabethanism was muchmore than a brief moment of optimistic hyperbole. Indeed, from moderndrama and film to the reinternment of Richard III, from the London Olympicsto the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, it continues to pervade contemporaryartistic expression, politics, and key moments of national pageantry.
This book offers an experiential perspective on the lives of Elizabethans—how they worked, ate, and played—with hands-on examples that include authentic music, recipes, and games of the period. Daily Life in Elizabethan England: Second Edition offers a fresh look at Elizabethan life from the perspective of the people who actually lived it. With an abundance of updates based on the most current research, this second edition provides an engaging—and sometimes surprising—picture of what it was like to live during this distant time. Readers will learn, for example, that Elizabethans were diligent recyclers, composting kitchen waste and collecting old rags for papermaking. They will discover that Elizabethans averaged less than 2 inches shorter than their modern British counterparts, and, in a surprising echo of our own age, that many Elizabethan city dwellers relied on carryout meals—albeit because they lacked kitchen facilities. What further sets the book apart is its "hands-on" approach to the past with the inclusion of actual music, games, recipes, and clothing patterns based on primary sources.
"Hakluyt's Promise demonstrates [Hakluyt's] prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly fifty illustrations - many unpublished since the sixteenth century - and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age"--Jacket.
Elizabethan Silent Language is an anatomy of an alternative or supplementary mode of communication in a culture prized for its literary contributions. Through the use of nonverbal media, Elizabethans coexpressed, enhanced, andøsometimes even subverted the medium of the written or spoken word. Besides written documents and works of art, extant material reveals new referents and deeper meaning for Elizabethan verbal expression. Funeral monuments, jewelry, costume, foodstuffs, protocol, sumptuary laws, portraits, architecture, management of public appearance, absence, and silence?all were forms of a silent language. The main elements of the semantic system of Elizabethan silent language were in many cases those of literal language, with resources in religion, in antiquity as translated through humanist tradition, in custom and law, in the Continental Renaissance, and in Tudor historiography?syntactic elements translated through word and practice and subject to personal inflection. Assumed as given values were the masculine norm, young adulthood, courtly service, discernment of ethical and aesthetic dimensions in all aspects of life, a comprehensive rule of decorum, and the preservation of religious, political, and social hierarchy. Elizabethan Silent Language is a unique book. Although Renaissance scholars have focused their attention on individual components of texts, such as ceremony, costume, architecture, protocol, and portrait, no other source synthesizes these components.