Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare

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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 the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031400062
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (314 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England by : Walter S H Lim

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Theater of Religious Conviction in Early Modern England written by Walter S H Lim and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare’s literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare’s deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare’s engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

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Author :
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.

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350110329
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation by : Diana E. Henderson

Download or read book The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation written by Diana E. Henderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation explores the dynamics of adapted Shakespeare across a range of literary genres and new media forms. This comprehensive reference and research resource maps the field of Shakespeare adaptation studies, identifying theories of adaptation, their application in practice and the methodologies that underpin them. It investigates current research and points towards future lines of enquiry for students, researchers and creative practitioners of Shakespeare adaptation. The opening section on research methods and problems considers definitions and theories of Shakespeare adaptation and emphasises how Shakespeare is both adaptor and adapted.A central section develops these theoretical concerns through a series of case studies that move across a range of genres, media forms and cultures to ask not only how Shakespeare is variously transfigured, hybridised and valorised through adaptational play, but also how adaptations produce interpretive communities, and within these potentially new literacies, modes of engagement and sensory pleasures. The volume's third section provides the reader with uniquely detailed insights into creative adaptation, with writers and practice-based researchers reflecting on their close collaborations with Shakespeare's works as an aesthetic, ethical and political encounter. The Handbook further establishes the conceptual parameters of the field through detailed, practical resources that will aid the specialist and non-specialist reader alike, including a guide to research resources and an annotated bibliography.

Shakespeare and Social Engagement

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Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1805390635
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and Social Engagement by : Rowan Mackenzie

Download or read book Shakespeare and Social Engagement written by Rowan Mackenzie and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2023-08-11 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare’s roots in applied and participatory performance practices have been recently explored within a wide variety of educational, theatrical and community settings. Shakespeare and Social Engagement explores these settings, as well as audiences who have largely been excluded from existing accounts of Shakespeare’s performance history. The contributions in this collected volume explore the complicated and vibrant encounters between a canonical cultural force and work that frequently characterizes itself as inclusive and egalitarian.

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1666902098
Total Pages : 495 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (669 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation by : Dennis Taylor

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation written by Dennis Taylor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference explores how Shakespeare’s plays dramatize key issues of the Elizabethan Reformation, the conflict between the sacred, the critical, and the disenchanted; alternatively, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the secular. Each play imagines their reconciliation or the failure of reconcilation. The Catholic sacred is shadowed by its degeneration into superstition, Protestant critique by its unintended (fissaparous) consequences, the secular ordinary by stark disenchantment. Shakespeare shows how all three perspectives are needed if society is to face its intractable problems, thus providing a powerful model for our own ecumenical dialogues. Shakespeare begins with history plays contrasting the saintly but impractical King Henry VI, whose assassination is the ”primal crime,” with the pragmatic and secular Henry IV, until imagining in the later 1590’s how Hal can reconnect with sacred sources. At the same time in his comedies, Shakespeare imagines cooperative ways of resolving the national ”comedy of errors,” of sorting out erotic and marital and contemplative confusions by applying his triple lens. His late Elizabethan comedies achieve a polished balance of wit and devotion, ordinary and the sacred, old and new orders. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ultimate Elizabethan consideration of these issues, its so-called lack of objective correlation a response to the unsorted trauma of the Reformation.

Shakespeare / Text

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350128163
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare / Text by : Claire M. L. Bourne

Download or read book Shakespeare / Text written by Claire M. L. Bourne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare / Text sets new agendas for the study and use of the Shakespearean text. Written by 20 leading experts on textual matters, each chapter challenges a single entrenched binary – such as book/theatre, source/adaptation, text/paratext, canon/apocrypha, sense/nonsense, extant/ephemeral, material/digital and original/copy – that has come to both define and limit the way we read, analyze, teach, perform and edit Shakespeare today. Drawing on methods from book history, bibliography, editorial theory, library science, the digital humanities, theatre studies and literary criticism, the collection as a whole proposes that our understanding of Shakespeare – and early modern drama more broadly – changes radically when 'either/or' approaches to the Shakespearean text are reconfigured. The chapters in Shakespeare / Text make strong cases for challenging received wisdom and offer new, portable methods of treating 'the text', in its myriad instantiations, that will be useful to scholars, editors, theatre practitioners, teachers and librarians.

Shakespeare and Community Performance

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031332679
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (313 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and Community Performance by : Katherine Steele Brokaw

Download or read book Shakespeare and Community Performance written by Katherine Steele Brokaw and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-09 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how productions of Shakespearean plays create meaning in specific communities, with special attention to issues of access, adaptation, and activism. Instead of focusing on large professional companies, it analyzes performances put on by community theatres and grassroots companies, and in applied drama projects. It looks at Shakespearean productions created by marginalized populations in Greater London, Harlem, and Los Angeles, a Hamlet staged in the remote Faroe Islands, and eco-theatre made in California’s Yosemite National Park. The book investigates why different communities perform Shakespeare, and what challenges, opportunities, and triumphs accompany the processes of theatrical production for both the artists and the communities in which they are embedded.

Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature

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Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030663337
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature by : Abe Davies

Download or read book Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature written by Abe Davies and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of ghostly matters - of the soul - in literature spanning the tenth century and the age of Shakespeare. All people, according to John Donne, ‘constantly beleeve’ that they have an immortal soul. But he also reflects that in fact there is nothing ‘so well established as constrains us to beleeve, both that the soul is immortall, and that every particular man hath such a soul’. In understanding the question of man's disembodied part as at once fundamental and fundamentally uncertain he was entirely of his time, and Imagining the Soul in Premodern Literature considers this fraught, shifting, yet uniquely compelling entity in the context of the literary forms and effects involved in its representation. Gruesome medieval dialogues between damned souls and worm-eaten bodies; verse and prose works by Donne, René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish and Andrew Marvell; a profusion of sonnet sequences, sermons, manuals of instruction and travelogues; Hamlet and its natural philosophical thinking about the apparently disembodied soul haunting Elsinore: these chapters range across all this and more, offering a rigorous yet accessible account of an essential aspect of premodern literature that will be of interest to scholars, students and the general reader alike.

The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192865919
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform by : Gina M. Di Salvo

Download or read book The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform written by Gina M. Di Salvo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The age of miracles was not yet past on the Shakespearean stage. In the first book-length study of the English saint play across the Reformation divide, The Renaissance of the Saints after Reform recovers the surprisingly long theatrical life of the saints from a tenth-century monastery to the Restoration stage. Through a reassessment of archival records of performance and religious change, this book challenges the established history of the saint play as a product of medieval devotional culture that ended with the national conversion to Protestantism during the Reformation. Not only did saints in performance frequently diverge from the narratives of devotional literature during the Middle Ages but also saints made a spectacular reappearance in the theatre of the early modern era. In the rupture between those two eras, the English church separated itself from the Cult of the Saints, and saints disappeared from public view until sainthood transformed from a matter of theology into a matter of theatricality. Early modern saint plays document a post-Reformation culture committed to saints-but not all saints. Certain ancient martyrs and British saints returned to the liturgical calendar in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. This limited inventory performed an initial de-Catholicization of these saints, but it did not recover their lives. Instead, the theatre produced new lives of the saints for the English public. A period of experimentation with saints and devils in the 1590s was followed by unprecedented innovation throughout the Stuart era. This book traces the transformation of sainthood in early modern drama from ambiguous supernatural association and negotiated patronage to a renaissance of miraculous theatricality and sacred place-making. By excavating saints in plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger, and Rowley as well as plays authored by relatively unknown dramatists, this book reconfigures how we think about the legacy of late medieval religious culture, the impact of Reformation change on literary texts and social practices, and the development of English theatre and drama.

Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192677950
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature by : Ari Friedlander

Download or read book Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature written by Ari Friedlander and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "rogue," a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace—and their seductive appeal—emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, this volume posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of "socio-sexual identity" and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. With its focus on reproduction, rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called "biopolitics," the state's focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, this book shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets' rendering of the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population—as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.

Bold Conscience

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Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817361111
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Bold Conscience by : Joshua R. Held

Download or read book Bold Conscience written by Joshua R. Held and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023-06-13 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "'Bold Conscience' chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint--what the author labels "cowardly conscience"--to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. Caught at the vortex of public and private concerns, the concept of the conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders on down to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the consequent regicide of King Charles I. Yet within this mix of perspectives, the most sinuous, complex, and ultimately lasting perspectives on bold conscience emerge from deliberately literary, rhetorically artistic voices--Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors, in re-casting the idea of conscience as a private, interior, shameful state to one of boldness fit for the public realm, parallel a historical development in which the conscience becomes a platform both for royal power and for common dissent in post-Reformation England. With the 1649 regicide of King Charles I as a fulcrum that unites both literary and historical timelines, Held tracks the increasing power of the conscience from William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Henry VIII to John Donne's court sermons, and finally to Milton's Areopagitica and Charles's defense of his kingship, Eikon Basilike. In a direct attack on Eikon Basilike, Milton destroys the prerogative of the royal conscience in Eikonoklastes, and later in Paradise Lost proposes an alternative basis for inner confidence, rooting it not in divine right but in the 'paradise within,' a metonym for conscience. Applying a fine-grain literary analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study looks backward as well to the theological foundations of the concept in Luther of the 1520s and forward to its transformation by Locke into the term 'consciousness' in 1689. Ultimately, Held's study shows how the idea of a conscience in early modern England, long central to the private self and linked to the will, memory, and mind-emerges as a nexus between the private self and the realm of public action, a bulwark against absolute sovereignty, and its attenuation as a means of more limited, personal certainty. Whether in Milton's struggle against King Charles or Hamlet's against King Claudius, the conscience born of the Reformation becomes less a state of inner critique and more a form of outward expression fit for the communal life and commitments demanded by the early modern era"--

Shakespeare and Religious Change

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230240852
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and Religious Change by : K. Graham

Download or read book Shakespeare and Religious Change written by K. Graham and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-16 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This balanced and innovative collection explores the relationship of Shakespeare's plays to the changing face of early modern religion, considering the connections between Shakespeare's theatre and the religious past, the religious identities of the present and the deep cultural changes that would shape the future of religion in the modern world.

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love

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Author :
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810124238
Total Pages : 245 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare and the Nature of Love by : Marcus Nordlund

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Nature of Love written by Marcus Nordlund and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-27 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare’s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about love, biology, and culture raised by his method, Nordlund considers four specific forms of love in seven of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the vicissitudes of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, he argues that Shakespeare makes a sustained inquiry into the impact of culture and society upon the natural human affections. King Lear offers insight into the conflicted relationship between love and duty. In two problem plays about romantic love, Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well, the tension between individual idiosyncrasies and social consensus becomes especially salient. And finally, in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, Nordlund asks what Shakespeare can tell us about the dark avatar of jealousy.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199660840
Total Pages : 849 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (996 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare by : Robert Malcolm Smuts

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare written by Robert Malcolm Smuts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title offers literary scholars a variety of perspectives, insights and methodologies found in current historical work that inform the study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Religion Around Shakespeare

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (883 download)

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Book Synopsis Religion Around Shakespeare by : Peter Iver Kaufman

Download or read book Religion Around Shakespeare written by Peter Iver Kaufman and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the historic and religious context surrounding the work of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance

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Publisher : Burns & Oates
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance by : Velma Bourgeois Richmond

Download or read book Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance written by Velma Bourgeois Richmond and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 2000 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Important new historic and documentary evidence supports revised assessments of the English Reformation. They show the true richness of late-medieval Catholicism and indicate that shifts in religion, especially under Queen Elizabeth I, were the result of political, social, as well as economic changes rather than belief. On the other hand, especially in an age of considerable social upheaval, proof of an individual's religious conviction is unlikely. Nonetheless, this book establishes that William Shakespeare wrote with a Catholic "habit of mind" that found in medieval romance its most effective secular expression.