This book considers the influence that sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century mathematical thinking exerted on the writing and production of popular drama between about 1587 and 1603. It concentrates upon six plays by five early modern dramatists: Tamburlaine, Part 1 (1587) and Tamburlaine, Part 2 (1587) by Christopher Marlowe; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589) by Robert Greene; Old Fortunatus (1599) by Thomas Dekker; Hamlet (1600) by William Shakespeare; and The Tragedy of Hoffman (1603) by Henry Chettle. Each chapter analyses how the terms, concepts, and implications of contemporary mathematics impacted upon these plays’ vocabularies, forms, and aesthetic and dramaturgical effects and affects.
This handbook features essays written by both literary scholars and mathematicians that examine multiple facets of the connections between literature and mathematics. These connections range from mathematics and poetic meter to mathematics and modernism to mathematics as literature. Some chapters focus on a single author, such as mathematics and Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, or Charles Dickens, while others consider a mathematical topic common to two or more authors, such as squaring the circle, chaos theory, Newton’s calculus, or stochastic processes. With appeal for scholars and students in literature, mathematics, cultural history, and history of mathematics, this important volume aims to introduce the range, fertility, and complexity of the connections between mathematics, literature, and literary theory. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via [link.springer.com|http://link.springer.com/].
"The proof stage is the story of the unexpected collaborations and resonances between theater and mathematics and how they have evolved since the turn of the twentieth century. Toward the end of the 1800s, unsettling discoveries about alternate geometries and the mathematical infinite began to reveal that, despite its reputation for absolute certainty, mathematical truth is not immutable. At the same time, new, experimental forms of theater were rapidly developing-some inspired by these very upheavals in mathematics. Both disciplines were, and are, characterized by a quest for truth and a shared ability to investigate their respective limitations. Stephen Abbott provides the first systematic, book-length treatment of the interactions between mathematics and theater that have occurred over the last 120 years. Drawing on the author's fifteen years of experience researching and teaching a course on the subject, the book examines how the two disciplines reveal novel insights about one another. Stages of Uncertainty follows the path of playwrights that engaged mathematics such as Alfred Jarry, Stanislav Witkeiwicz, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Felix Durrenmatt, Tom Stoppard, Micheal Frayn, and Simon McBurney. Intertwined with this history is the history of mathematics; along the way, Abbott describes the development of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, incompleteness, and alternative geometries that occurred as these plays were being written. The main arguments are that these two domains have deep resonances, including shared notions of uncertainty, self-reference, recursion, and orientation, and that theater has engaged deeply and innovatively with math for many years. Abbott reveals a unique portrait of mathematics, one that is unexpected and deeply human"--
Robert Greene holds a significant place in our understanding of Elizabethan literature. This book offers the most rigorous attempt yet undertaken to determine the scope of the playwright’s canon through analyses of Greene’s verse style, vocabulary, rhyming habits, and the dramatist’s phraseology in his attested plays and in comparison to four plays that have long been on the margins of Greene’s corpus: Locrine, Selimus, George a Greene, and A Knack to Know a Knave. The book defines the ranges for Greene’s stylistic habits for the very first time and proceeds to identify parallels of thought, language, and overall dramaturgy that reveal a single author’s creative consciousness. This volume also casts light on Greene as a more collaborative dramatist than has hitherto been acknowledged. Through emphasizing the immediate surroundings in which Greene was writing – the flourishing of popular theatres in two compact areas of London, in which each theatre company and their dra-matists kept a close eye on what their competitors were producing – Greene emerges as an influential playwright, whose restored oeuvre enables us to establish new ways in which his dramatic methods impacted other writers of the period, including Shakespeare.
While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.
Acclaim for the first edition of Academic Tribes and Territories: '...Becher's insistence upon in-depth analysis of the extant literature while reporting his own sustained research doubled the thickness of the material to be covered...Academic Tribes and Territories is a superb addition to the literature on higher education...There is here an education to be had.' (Burton R. Clark, Higher Education) '...Becher's landmark work. The higher education community - both practitioners and educational researchers - need to assimilate and to heed the message of this important and insightful book.' (Alan E. Bayer, Journal of Higher Education) 'a bold approach to a theory of academic relations...The result is a debt to him {Becher} for all students of higher education.' (The Times Educational Supplement) 'a classic in its field...The book is readily accessible to any member of the academic profession, but it also adds significantly to a specialist understanding of the internal life of higher education institutions in Britain and North America. I confidently predict that it will appear prominently on citation indices for many years.' (Gareth Williams, Studies in Higher Education) How do academics perceive themselves and colleagues in their own disciplines, and how do they rate those in other subjects? How closely related are their intellectual tasks and their ways of organizing their professional lives? What are the interconnections between academic cultures and the nature of disciplines? Academic Tribes and Territories maps academic knowledge and explores the diverse characteristics of those who inhabit and cultivate it. This second edition provides a thorough update to Tony Becher's classic text, first published in 1989, and incorporates research findings and new theoretical perspectives. Fundamental changes in the nature of higher education and in the academic's role are reviewed and their significance for academic cultures is assessed. This edition moves beyond the first edition's focus on elite universities and the research role to examine academic cultures in lower status institutions internationally and to place a new emphasis on issues of gender and ethnicity. This second edition successfully renews a classic in the field of higher education.
As a figurehead for the literary humanities, and a dramatist whose plays feature fairies, ghosts, and spirits, Shakespeare may not be the first author that comes to mind when thinking about science. Tom Rutter shows, however, that in his plays and poetry Shakespeare made detailed use of the knowledge and theories of the cosmos, the natural world, and human biology that were available to him. These range from astronomical and anatomical ideas derived from medieval scholars, Islamic philosophers, and ancient Greek and Roman authorities, through to the challenges issued to those earlier models by more recent figures such as Copernicus and Vesalius. Shakespeare's treatment of these materials was informed by the poetic and dramatic media in which he worked; the dialogic nature of drama enabled an approach that could be provisional, exploratory, and tolerant of uncertainty and contradiction. Shakespeare made the early modern playhouse a venue for the production of scientific understanding through performance, illusion, and the creative use of space. As well as surveying current scholarship that contextualizes Shakespeare's work in relation to histories of meteorology, matter theory, humoral physiology, racialization, mathematics, and more, Shakespeare and Science offers detailed original readings of a variety of texts including the Histories, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, the Sonnets, and Lucrece. It also makes extensive reference to works by Shakespeare's near-contemporaries such as Robert Recorde, William Fulke, Juan Huarte, and Thomas Elyot. Its four chapters focus on astronomy and meteorology, matter, the body, and mathematics. Rutter's overall approach is informed by recent studies that interrogate 'science' as a concept, and that question both the boundary between literature and science and the idea of a seventeenth-century 'scientific revolution'.
In Shakespeare's England, credit was synonymous with reputation, and reputation developed in the interplay of language, conduct, and social interpretation. As a consequence, artful language and social hermeneutics became practical, profitable skills. Since most people both used credit and extended it, the dual strategies of implication and inference—of producing and reading evidence—were everywhere. Like poetry or drama, credit was constructed: fashioned out of the interplay of artifice and interpretation. The rhetorical dimension of economic relations produced social fictions on a range of scales: from transitory performances facilitating local transactions to the long-term project of maintaining creditworthiness to the generalized social indeterminacy that arose from the interplay of performance and interpretation. Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living”: practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction.
