Enchantment And Dis Enchantment In Shakespeare And Early Modern Drama

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Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Author : Nandini Das
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317290682
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama by : Nandini Das

Download or read book Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama written by Nandini Das and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama

Author : Nandini Das
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317290674
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama by : Nandini Das

Download or read book Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama written by Nandini Das and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

Author : Kent Cartwright
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019263965X
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment by : Kent Cartwright

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment written by Kent Cartwright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment argues that enchantment constitutes a key emotional and intellectual dimension of Shakespeare's comedies. It thus makes a new claim about the rejuvenating value of comedy for individuals and society. Shakespeare's comedies orchestrate ongoing encounters between the rational and the mysterious, between doubt and fascination, with feelings moved by elements of enchantment that also seem a little ridiculous. In such a drama, lines of causality become complex, and even satisfying endings leave certain matters incomplete and contingent—openings for scrutiny and thought. In addressing enchantment, the book takes exception to the modernist vision of a deterministic 'disenchanted' world. As Shakespeare's action advances, comic mysteries accrue—uncanny coincidences; magical sympathies; inexplicable repetitions; psychic influences; and puzzlements about the meaning of events—all of whose numinous effects linger ambiguously after reason has apparently answered the play's questions. Separate chapters explore the devices, tropes, and motifs of enchantment: magical clowns who alter the action through stop-time interludes; structural repetitions that suggest mysteriously converging, even opaquely providential destinies; locales that oppose magical and protean forces to regulatory and quotidian values; desires, thoughts, and utterances that 'manifest' comically monstrous events; characters who return from the dead, facilitated by the desires of the living; play-endings crossed by harmony and dissonance, with moments of wonder that make possible the mysterious action of forgiveness. Wonder and wondering in Shakespeare's and other comedies, it emerges, become the conditions for new possibilities. Chapters refer extensively to early modern history, Renaissance and modern theories of comedy, treatises on magical science, and contemporaneous Italian and Tudor comedy.

Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare

Author : Katherine Steele Brokaw
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810140500
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare by : Katherine Steele Brokaw

Download or read book Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare written by Katherine Steele Brokaw and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-15 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term “secular” inspires thinking about disenchantment, periodization, modernity, and subjectivity. The essays in Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare argue that Shakespeare’s plays present “secularization” not only as a historical narrative of progress but also as a hermeneutic process that unleashes complex and often problematic transactions between sacred and secular. These transactions shape ideas about everything from pastoral government and performative language to wonder and the spatial imagination. Thinking about Shakespeare and secularization also involves thinking about how to interpret history and temporality in the contexts of Shakespeare’s medieval past, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, and the critical dispositions that define Shakespeare studies today. These essays reject a necessary opposition between “sacred” and “secular” and instead analyze how such categories intersect. In fresh analyses of plays ranging from Hamlet and The Tempest to All’s Well that Ends Well and All Is True, secularization emerges as an interpretive act that explores the cultural protocols of representation within both Shakespeare’s plays and the critical domains in which they are studied and taught. The volume’s diverse disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches shift our focus from literal religion and doctrinal issues to such aspects of early modern culture as theatrical performance, geography, race, architecture, music, and the visual arts.

Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures

Author : Jennifer Holl
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000422216
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures by : Jennifer Holl

Download or read book Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures written by Jennifer Holl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of the other. In five chapters, Jennifer Holl explores the early modern culture of theatrical celebrity and its resonances in print and performance, especially in Shakespeare’s interrogations of this emerging phenomenon in sonnets and histories, before moving on to examine the ways that shifting cultures of stage, film, and digital celebrity have perpetually recreated the Shakespeare, or even the #shakespeare, with whom audiences continue to interact. Situated at an intersection of multiple critical conversations, this book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriations, early modern theater, and celebrity studies.

Shakespeare and the supernatural

Author : Victoria Bladen
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526109131
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and the supernatural by : Victoria Bladen

Download or read book Shakespeare and the supernatural written by Victoria Bladen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection of twelve essays from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars explores the supernatural in Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives and approaches.

Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare

Author : Daisy Murray
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317195701
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare by : Daisy Murray

Download or read book Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare written by Daisy Murray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates the early modern understanding of twinship through new readings of plays, informed by discussions of twins appearing in such literature as anatomy tracts, midwifery manuals, monstrous birth broadsides, and chapbooks. The book contextualizes such dramatic representations of twinship, investigating contemporary discussions about twins in medical and popular literature and how such dialogues resonate with the twin characters appearing on the early modern stage. Garofalo demonstrates that, in this period, twin births were viewed as biologically aberrant and, because of this classification, authors frequently attempt to explain the phenomenon in ways which call into question the moral and constitutional standing of both the parents and the twins themselves. In line with current critical studies on pregnancy and the female body, discussions of twin births reveal a distrust of the mother and the processes surrounding twin conception; however, a corresponding suspicion of twins also emerges, which monstrous birth pamphlets exemplify. This book analyzes the representation of twins in early modern drama in light of this information, moving from tragedies through to comedies. This progression demonstrates how the dramatic potential inherent in the early modern understanding of twinship is capitalized on by playwrights, as negative ideas about twins can be seen transitioning into tragic and tragicomic depictions of twinship. However, by building toward a positive, comic representation of twins, the work additionally suggests an alternate interpretation of twinship in this period, which appreciates and celebrates twins because of their difference. The volume will be of interest to those studying Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in relation to the History of Emotions, the Body, and the Medical Humanities.

Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama

Author : Matthieu Chapman
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317195515
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama by : Matthieu Chapman

Download or read book Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama written by Matthieu Chapman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to deploy the methods and ensemble of questions from Afro-pessimism to engage and interrogate the methods of Early Modern English studies. Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, it engages the arguments for race as a fluid construction of human identity by addressing how race in Early Modern England functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human subjectivity. Chapman argues that Blackness is the marker of social death that allows for constructions of human identity to become transmutable based on the impossibility of recognition and incorporation for Blackness into humanity. Using dramatic texts such as Othello, Titus Andronicus, and other Early Modern English plays both popular and lesser known, the book shifts the binary away from the currently accepted standard of white/non-white that defines "otherness" in the period and examines race in Early Modern England from the prospective of a non-black/black antagonism. The volume corrects the Afro-pessimist assumption that the Triangle Slave Trade caused a rupture between Blackness and humanity. By locating notions of Black inhumanity in England prior to chattel slavery, the book positions the Triangle Trade as a result of, rather than the cause of, Black inhumanity. It also challenges the common scholarly assumption that all varying types of human identity in Early Modern England were equally fluid by arguing that Blackness functioned as an immutable constant. Through the use of structural analysis, this volume works to simplify and demystify notions of race in Renaissance England by arguing that race is not only a marker of human identity, but a structural antagonism between those engaged in human civil society opposed to those who are socially dead. It will be an essential volume for those with interest in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Shakespeare, Contemporary Performance Theory, Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies.

Gender, Speech, and Audience Reception in Early Modern England

Author : Kathleen Kalpin Smith
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315465752
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (154 download)

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Book Synopsis Gender, Speech, and Audience Reception in Early Modern England by : Kathleen Kalpin Smith

Download or read book Gender, Speech, and Audience Reception in Early Modern England written by Kathleen Kalpin Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes a significant contribution to recent scholarship on the ways in which women responded to the regulation of their behavior by focusing on representations of women speakers and their audiences in moments Smith identifies as "scenes of speech." This new approach, examining speech exchanges between a speaker and audience in which both anticipate, interact with, and respond to each other and each other's expectations, demonstrates that the prescriptive process involves a dynamic exchange in which each side plays a role in establishing and contesting the boundaries of acceptable speech for women. Drawing from a wide range of evidence, including pamphlets, diaries, illustrations, and plays, the book interprets the various and at times contradictory representations and reception of women’s speech that circulated in early modern England. Speech scenes examined within include wives' speech to their husbands in private, private speech between women, public speech before death, and the speech of witches. Looking at scenes of women’s speech from male and female authors, Smith argues that these early modern texts illustrate a means through which societal regulations were negotiated and modified. This book will appeal to those with an interest in early modern drama, including the playwrights Shakespeare, Cary, Webster, Fletcher, and Middleton, as well as readers of non-dramatic early modern literary texts. The volume is of particular use for scholars working in the areas of early modern literature and culture, women’s history, gender studies, and performance studies.

Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850

Author : P.H. Davison
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1349051802
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850 by : P.H. Davison

Download or read book Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850 written by P.H. Davison and published by Springer. This book was released on 1982-06-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Shakespeare and Hospitality

Author : Julia Reinhard Lupton
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317632893
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and Hospitality by : Julia Reinhard Lupton

Download or read book Shakespeare and Hospitality written by Julia Reinhard Lupton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality—with their numerous scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering—the collection demonstrates how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare's time and our own. By reading Shakespeare's plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts and objects—including almanacs, recipe books, husbandry manuals, and religious tracts — this book reimagines Shakespeare's playworld as one charged with the risks of hosting (rape and seduction, war and betrayal, enchantment and disenchantment) and the limits of generosity (how much can or should one give the guest, with what attitude or comportment, and under what circumstances?). This substantial volume maps the terrain of Shakespearean hospitality in its rich complexity, demonstrating the importance of historical, rhetorical, and phenomenological approaches to this diverse subject.

Distracted Subjects

Author : Carol Thomas Neely
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501729136
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Distracted Subjects by : Carol Thomas Neely

Download or read book Distracted Subjects written by Carol Thomas Neely and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book to provide a feminist analysis of early modern madness, Carol Thomas Neely reveals the mobility and heterogeneity of discourses of "distraction," the most common term for the condition in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Distracted Subjects shows how changing ideas of madness that circulated through medical, dramatic, and political texts transformed and gendered subjectivities. Supernatural causation is denied, new diagnoses appear, and stage representations proliferate. Drama sometimes leads and sometimes follows other cultural discourses—or forges its own prophetic figures of distraction. The Spanish Tragedy first links madness to masculine tragic self-representation, and Hamlet invents a language to dramatize feminine somatic illness. Innovative women's melancholy is theorized in medical and witchcraft treatises and then elaborated in the extended portrait of the Jailer's Daughter's distraction in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Lovesickness, newly diagnosed in women, demands novel cures, and allows expressions of transgressive sexual desire in treatises and in plays such as As You Like It. The rituals of possession and exorcism, intensely debated off stage, are mocked and exploited on stage in reiterated comic scenes of confinement that madden men to enhance women's power. Neely's final chapter provides a startling challenge to the critically alluring analogy between Bedlam and the early modern stage by documenting that Bethlem hospital offered care, not spectacle, whereas stage Bedlamites served metatheatrical and prophylactic, not mimetic, ends. An epilogue places this particular historical moment within the longer history of madness and shows how our own attitudes toward distraction are haunted by those earlier debates and representations.

Shakespeare and Hospitality

Author : Julia Reinhard Lupton
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317632885
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and Hospitality by : Julia Reinhard Lupton

Download or read book Shakespeare and Hospitality written by Julia Reinhard Lupton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality—with their numerous scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering—the collection demonstrates how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare's time and our own. By reading Shakespeare's plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts and objects—including almanacs, recipe books, husbandry manuals, and religious tracts — this book reimagines Shakespeare's playworld as one charged with the risks of hosting (rape and seduction, war and betrayal, enchantment and disenchantment) and the limits of generosity (how much can or should one give the guest, with what attitude or comportment, and under what circumstances?). This substantial volume maps the terrain of Shakespearean hospitality in its rich complexity, demonstrating the importance of historical, rhetorical, and phenomenological approaches to this diverse subject.

Enchanted Shows

Author : Elissa Hare
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315305895
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (153 download)

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Book Synopsis Enchanted Shows by : Elissa Hare

Download or read book Enchanted Shows written by Elissa Hare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book, first published in 1988, examines the role of magic in Elizabethan and Shakespearean theatre. The author observes how certain plays, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, rationalise the unrealism and improbabilities typical of romantic comedy as miracles wrought by specifically magical intervention. The author also explores the ways in which playwrights justify structural discontinuity by the working of magic. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

Reformations of the Body

Author : J. Waldron
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137313129
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (373 download)

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Book Synopsis Reformations of the Body by : J. Waldron

Download or read book Reformations of the Body written by J. Waldron and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This project takes the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theatre and overturns a longstanding notion about theatrical phenomenology in this period.

Allegory and Enchantment

Author : Jason Crawford
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191092126
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Allegory and Enchantment by : Jason Crawford

Download or read book Allegory and Enchantment written by Jason Crawford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Author : Lisa Hopkins
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317102754
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage by : Lisa Hopkins

Download or read book Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage written by Lisa Hopkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is staged and what the representational strategies and techniques might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.