Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox

Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox

Author: Peter G. Platt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1317056523

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.


Manuscript Matters

Manuscript Matters

Author: Lara M. Crowley

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-24

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0192554956

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Manuscript Matters illuminates responses to some of John Donne's most elusive texts by his contemporary audiences. Since examples of seventeenth-century literary criticism prove somewhat rare and frequently ambiguous, this book emphasizes a critical framework rarely used for exhibiting early readers' exegeses of literary texts: the complete manuscripts containing them. Many literary manuscripts that include poems by Donne and his contemporaries were compiled during their lifetimes, often by members of their circles. For this reason, and because various early modern poems and prose works satirize topical events and prominent figures in highly coded language, attempting to understand early literary interpretations proves challenging but highly valuable. Compilers, scribes, owners, and other readers–men and women who shared in Donne's political, religious, and social contexts–offer clues to their literary responses within a range of features related to the construction and subsequent use of the manuscripts. This study's findings call us to investigate more extensively and systematically how certain early manuscripts were constructed through analysis of such features as scripts, titles, sequence of contents, ascriptions, and variant diction. While such studies can throw light on many early modern texts, exploring artefacts containing Donne's works proves particularly useful because more of his poetry circulated in manuscript than did that of any other early modern poet. Manuscript Matters engages Donne's satiric, lyric, and religious poetry, as well as his prose paradoxes and problems. Analysing his texts within their manuscript contexts enables modern readers to interpret Donne's poetry and prose through an early modern lens.


A Feast of Strange Opinions: Classical and Early Modern Paradoxes on the English Renaissance Stage 1.1

A Feast of Strange Opinions: Classical and Early Modern Paradoxes on the English Renaissance Stage 1.1

Author: Emanuel Stelzer

Publisher: Skenè. Texts and Studies

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume aims at providing a comprehensive view of the performative as well as heuristic potentialities of the theatrical paradox in early modern plays. We are interested in discussing the functions and uses of paradoxes in early modern English drama by investigating how classical paradoxes were received and mediated in the Renaissance and by considering authors’ and playing companies’ purposes in choosing to explore the questions broached by such paradoxes. The book is articulated into three sections: the first, “Paradoxes of the Real”, is devoted to a theoretical investigation of the dramatic uses of paradoxes; the second, “Staging Mock Encomia” looks at the multiple dramatic functions of mock encomia and at the specific situations in which paradoxical praises were inserted in early modern plays; finally, the essays in “Paradoxical Dialogues” examine the connections between a number of early modern mock encomia and ancient or contemporary models.


Italian Literature Before 1900 in English Translation

Italian Literature Before 1900 in English Translation

Author: Robin Healey

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 1185

ISBN-13: 1442642696

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation provides the most complete record possible of texts from the early periods that have been translated into English, and published between 1929 and 2008. It lists works from all genres and subjects, and includes translations wherever they have appeared across the globe. In this annotated bibliography, Robin Healey covers over 5,200 distinct editions of pre-1900 Italian writings. Most entries are accompanied by useful notes providing information on authors, works, translators, and how the translations were received. Among the works by over 1,500 authors represented in this volume are hundreds of editions by Italy's most translated authors - Dante Alighieri, [Niccoláo] Machiavelli, and [Giovanni] Boccaccio - and other hundreds which represent the author's only English translation. A significant number of entries describe works originally published in Latin. Together with Healey's Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature."--Pub. desc.


Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World

Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9004386467

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Medicine and the Inquisition offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of the role played by the Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in shaping medical learning and practice in the period from 1500 to 1850. Until now, learned medicine has remained a secondary subject in scholarship on Inquisitions. This volume delves into physicians’ contributions to the inquisitorial machinery as well as the persecution of medical practitioners and the censorship of books of medicine. Although they are commonly depicted as all-pervasive systems of repression, the Inquisitions emerge from these essays as complex institutions. Authors investigate how boundaries between the medical and the religious were negotiated and transgressed in different contexts. The book sheds new light on the intellectual and social world of early modern physicians, paying particular attention to how they complied with, and at times undermined, ecclesiastical control and the hierarchies of power in which the medical profession was embedded. Contributors are Hervé Baudry, Bradford A. Bouley, Alessandra Celati, Maria Pia Donato, Martha Few, Guido M. Giglioni, Andrew Keitt, Hannah Marcus, and Timothy D. Walker. This volume includes the articles originally published in Volume XXIII, Nos. 1-2 (2018) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine with one additional chapter by Timothy D. Walker and an updated introduction.


Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance

Author: Michele Marrapodi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1317056442

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance investigates the works of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists from within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, from within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary traditions, with reference to the impact and influence of classical, coeval, and contemporary culture. In contrast to previous studies, the critical perspectives pursued in this volume’s tripartite organization take into account a wider European intertextual dimension and, above all, an ideological interpretation of the 'aesthetics' or 'politics' of intertextuality. Contributors perceive the presence of the Italian world in early modern England not as a traditional treasure trove of influence and imitation, but as a potential cultural force, consonant with complex processes of appropriation, transformation, and ideological opposition through a continuous dialectical interchange of compliance and subversion.


The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes

The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes

Author: Aloysius Martinich

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 665

ISBN-13: 0199791945

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes collects twenty-six newly commissioned, original chapters on the philosophy of the English thinker Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Best known today for his important influence on political philosophy, Hobbes was in fact a wide and deep thinker on a diverse range of issues. The chapters included in this Oxford Handbook cover the full range of Hobbes's thought--his philosophy of logic and language; his view of physics and scientific method; his ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law; and his views of religion, history, and literature. Several of the chapters overlap in fruitful ways, so that the reader can see the richness and depth of Hobbes's thought from a variety of perspectives. The contributors are experts on Hobbes from many countries, whose home disciplines include philosophy, political science, history, and literature. A substantial introduction places Hobbes's work, and contemporary scholarship on Hobbes, in a broad context.


Puritanism and the Pursuit of Happiness

Puritanism and the Pursuit of Happiness

Author: S. Bryn Roberts

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1843839784

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reveals a much neglected strand of puritan theology which emphasised the importance of inner happiness and personal piety.


The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts

The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts

Author: Wilfrid R. Prest

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-01-05

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1108962408

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Tudor and Stuart inns of court were major centres of learning and literature, as well as professional associations of practising lawyers. This book sketches the evolution of the inns from their medieval origins and traces the dramatic impact of the societies' rapid expansion through the Elizabethan era and beyond. Prest's comprehensive study based on original sources surveys the structure and functions of the inns, outlining key aspects, from tensions between junior and senior members to the nature and effectiveness of their educational role. Its lively prose locates the inns within the cultural, political, religious, and social context of Shakespearean and pre-civil war England. This corrected and revised second edition of a classic work addresses recent scholarship on the early modern inns of court and includes a new chapter introducing the book to twenty-first-century readers.