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The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales

Laurie Shannon

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds, but the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. ... More

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds, but the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As this book reveals, the modern human/animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’ famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what the author terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, the author explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, the author argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, the book contributes to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.Less

As You Like It

Robert Shaughnessy

This book examines the modern performance history of one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most enduring comedies, and one that has given opportunities for generations of theatre-makers and ... More

This book examines the modern performance history of one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most enduring comedies, and one that has given opportunities for generations of theatre-makers and theatre-goers to explore the pleasures of pastoral, gender masquerade and sexual ambiguity. Powered by Shakespeare’s greatest female comic role, the play invites us into a deeply English woodland that has also been imagined as a space of dreams. Beginning with the situation of the play in the context of early modern rehearsal and theatre practice, the book’s seven chapters successively examine the rich interplay between performance histories, changing relations with the natural world, and gender politics.Less

Being and Having in Shakespeare

Katharine Eisaman Maus

What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare’s plays engage with this question, elaborating a “poetics of property” centering on questions of ... More

What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare’s plays engage with this question, elaborating a “poetics of property” centering on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, of the different opportunities afforded by access to land and to chattel property. Richard II and the Henry IV plays construe sovereignty as a form of property right, largely construing imperium, or the authority over persons in a polity, as a form of dominium, the authority of the propertyholder. Nonetheless, what property means changes considerably from Richard’s reign to Henry’s, as the imagined world of the plays is reconfigured to include an urban economy of chattel consumables. The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and 1 Henry IV, reimagines, in comic terms, some of the same issues broached in the history plays. It focuses in particular on the problem of the daughter’s inheritance and on the different property obligations among friends, business associates, and spouses. In the figure of the “vagabond king,” theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, 2 Henry VI and King Lear both coordinate problems of entitlement with conundrums about distributive justice, raising fundamental questions about property relations and social organization.Less

The Bible in Shakespeare

Hannibal Hamlin

The Bible in Shakespeare is the first full-length critical study of biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s plays. There is no book Shakespeare alludes to more often, more significantly, and ... More

The Bible in Shakespeare is the first full-length critical study of biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s plays. There is no book Shakespeare alludes to more often, more significantly, and in every play he wrote, than the Bible. Shakespeare was a serious, if sometimes skeptical, Bible reader, but he knew too that he could count on his audience recognizing and understanding biblical allusions, since Elizabethan and Jacobean culture was pervasively biblical. The book describes this biblical culture, and offers fresh and sometimes surprising interpretations of many of Shakespeare’s plays by reading his biblical allusions in the context of interpretations of Scripture available to him and his audience. Allusions to the Bible sometimes connect to the religious concerns of early modern England, but, in an age when the sacred and secular were inextricably intertwined, biblical characters, stories, and ideas were understood to connect to most areas of human life: love, sex, and marriage, history and politics, law and finance, jealousy, betrayal, murder, suffering, and sacrifice, gardening, medicine, and science. Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible do not imply any particular religiosity on his part, nor are they evidence for his personal beliefs. Allusion was one of Shakespeare’s most essential literary devices, and allusions to the Bible are one his best methods of engaging his audience and enhancing the meaning of his plays.Less

Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice

Janet Adelman

In this book, the author confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With a distinctive psychological acumen, this book argues that William Shakespeare's play ... More

In this book, the author confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With a distinctive psychological acumen, this book argues that William Shakespeare's play frames the uneasy relationship between Christians and Jews specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The book locates the promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variety of cultural materials, it demonstrates that, despite the triumph of its Christians, The Merchant of Venice reflects Christian anxiety and guilt about its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of Judaism. In this psycho-theological analysis, both the insistence that Shylock's daughter Jessica remain racially bound to her father after her conversion and the depiction of Shylock as a bloody-minded monster are understood as antidotes to Christian uneasiness about a Judaism it can neither own nor disown. In taking seriously the religious discourse of The Merchant of Venice, the book offers a book both on the play itself and on the question of Jews and Judaism in Renaissance England and beyond.Less

Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music

Joseph M. Ortiz

Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly ... More

Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly promiscuous in its application and effects. Subsequently, much writing in the period reflects a desire to ward off music's illegibility rather than come to terms with its actual effects. This book revises our understanding of music's relationship to language in Renaissance England. It shows the degree to which discussions of music were ideologically and politically charged. Offering a historically nuanced account of the early modern debate over music, along with close readings of several of Shakespeare's plays (including Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale) and Milton's A Maske, the book challenges the consensus that music's affinity with poetry was widely accepted, or even desired, by Renaissance poets. Shakespeare, more than any other early modern poet, exposed the fault lines in the debate about music's function in art, repeatedly staging disruptive scenes of music that expose an underlying struggle between textual and sensuous authorities. Such musical interventions in textual experiences highlight the significance of sound as an aesthetic and sensory experience independent of any narrative function.Less

Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare's Stage

Katherine Gillen

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. ... More

Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage’s production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity—itself a quasi-commodity—to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. The economic imagery surrounding chastity ranges from romantic evocations of treasure to more quotidian references to usury, counterfeiting, and commodity exchange. Attending to such discourse in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Chaste Value argues that representations of chastity (married fidelity as well as virginity) figure centrally within the early modern theatre’s interrogation of early capitalism, particularly with regard to the incorporation of people into commercial exchange. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labour can be incorporated into market exchange.Less

The Child in Shakespeare

Charlotte Scott

This book examines the child on Shakespeare’s stage. As a life force, an impassioned plea for justice, a legacy, history, memory, or image of love or violence, children are everywhere in ... More

This book examines the child on Shakespeare’s stage. As a life force, an impassioned plea for justice, a legacy, history, memory, or image of love or violence, children are everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. Focusing on Shakespeare’s unique interest in the young body, the life stage, the parental and social dynamic, this book offers the first sustained account of the role and representation of the child in Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination. Drawing on a vast range of contemporary texts, including parenting manuals, household and pedagogic texts, as well as books on nursing and maternity, childbirth and child rearing, Shakespeare’s Children explores the contexts in which the idea of the child is mobilized as a body and image on the early modern stage. Understanding the child, not only as a specific life stage, but also as a role and an abstraction of feeling, this book examines why Shakespeare, who showed little interest in writing for children in the playing companies, wrote so powerfully about them on his stage.Less

Circumstantial Shakespeare

Lorna Hutson

Shakespeare’s characters are thought to be his greatest achievement—imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality. This view has survived the deconstruction of ‘Shakespeare as ... More

Shakespeare’s characters are thought to be his greatest achievement—imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality. This view has survived the deconstruction of ‘Shakespeare as Author’ and has been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare’s characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. This book explodes these critical commonplaces. Drawing on classical and sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images (enargeia). ‘Circumstances’—which we now think of as incalculable contingencies—were originally topics of forensic enquiry into human intention or passion. Shakespeare used these topics to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. The book discusses Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, Lear, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Macbeth, as well as Gorboduc, The Maid’s Tragedy, and plays by Lyly and Jonson. It reveals the importance of circumstantial proof to various dramatists and highlights Shakespeare’s distinctive use of circumstances to create vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. The book engages with eighteenth-century and contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of probability, psychoanalytic criticism, and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.Less

Coleridge: Lectures on Shakespeare (1811-1819)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Adam Roberts (ed.)

This book comprises a freshly composed edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton and 1818–19 Lectures on Shakespeare. Coleridge is a foundational figure in ... More

This book comprises a freshly composed edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton and 1818–19 Lectures on Shakespeare. Coleridge is a foundational figure in Shakespeare criticism, and remains to this day one of the most incisive and best. The book provides a background context into Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare, and looks into Coleridge's life and career, giving special attention to his position as a lecturer as well as the general content of his lectures. The book also explores Coleridge's relationships with August Wilhelm Schegel and William Hazlitt and their own scholarship on Shakespeare's oeuvre.Less

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare: Metaphor, Cognition and Eros

Gillian Knoll

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the ... More

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience. Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences. Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.Less

Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama

Farah Karim-Cooper

This study examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics. The author analyses contemporary tracts that address the then-contentious ... More

This study examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics. The author analyses contemporary tracts that address the then-contentious issue of cosmetic practice and identifies a ‘culture of cosmetics’, which finds its visual identity on the Renaissance stage. She also examines cosmetic recipes and their relationship to drama, as well as to the construction of early modern identities.Less

Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case

MacDonald P. Jackson

‘That very great play, Pericles’, as T. S. Eliot called it, poses formidable problems of text and authorship. The first of the Late Romances, it was ascribed to Shakespeare when printed in a quarto ... More

‘That very great play, Pericles’, as T. S. Eliot called it, poses formidable problems of text and authorship. The first of the Late Romances, it was ascribed to Shakespeare when printed in a quarto of 1609, but was not included in the First Folio (1623) collection of his plays. This book examines rival theories about the quarto's origins and offers compelling evidence that Pericles is the product of collaboration between Shakespeare and the minor dramatist George Wilkins, who was responsible for the first two acts and for portions of the ‘brothel scenes’ in Act 4. Pericles serves as a test case for methodologies that seek to define the limits of the Shakespeare canon and to identify co-authors. A wide range of metrical, lexical, and other data is analysed. Computerized ‘stylometric’ texts are explained and their findings assessed. A concluding chapter introduces a new technique that has the potential to answer many of the remaining questions of attribution associated with Shakespeare and his contemporaries.Less

Determining the Shakespeare Canon: Arden of Faversham and A Lover's Complaint

MacDonald P. Jackson

This book aims to solve two problems of the Shakespeare canon. It makes the case for adding Arden of Faversham, first published anonymously in 1592, to editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, as a ... More

This book aims to solve two problems of the Shakespeare canon. It makes the case for adding Arden of Faversham, first published anonymously in 1592, to editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, as a play to which Shakespeare contributed. It shows that he was largely responsible for scenes 4–9, which constitute Act III in editions divided into acts. So it adds to the mounting evidence that early in his career Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights in the writing of scripts, as was common at the time. The second half of the volume provides grounds for accepting that publisher Thomas Thorpe’s inclusion of A Lover’s Complaint within the 1609 quarto entitled Shakespeare Sonnets was justified. The poem’s authenticity has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Its status is crucial to how critics assess the authority of the quarto’s ordering of sonnets and interpret the structure of the sequence as a whole. These two problems of attribution are each addressed in five separate chapters that describe the converging results of different approaches and rebut counter-arguments. Stylometric techniques, using the resources of computers and electronic databases, are applied and the research methodologies of other scholars explained and evaluated. Quantitative tests are supplemented with traditional literary-critical analysis.Less

Divinity and State

David Womersley

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed ‘certen matters of Divinytie ... More

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed ‘certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred’. How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a consequence of that demand for a usable national past created by the high political developments of the 1530s. Divinity and State explores the consequences of these events in the English historiography and historical drama of the sixteenth century. It is divided into four parts. In the first, the impact of reformed religion on narratives of the national past is measured and described. Part II examines how the entanglement of the national past and reformed religion was reflected in historical drama from Bale to the early years of James I, and focuses on two paradigmatic characters: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Part III considers Shakespeare's history plays in the light of the preceding discussion, and finds that Shakespeare's career as a historical dramatist shows him eventually re-shaping the history play with great audacity. Part IV corroborates this reading of Shakespeare's later history plays by reference to the dramatic ripostes they provoked.Less

The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre

Susan Zimmerman

This book explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the ‘dead’ in early modern English culture within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, ... More

This book explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the ‘dead’ in early modern English culture within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, psychoanalysis and anthropology. The author argues that concepts of the corpse as a semi-animate, generative and indeterminate entity were deeply rooted in medieval religious culture. Such concepts ran counter to early modern discourses that sought to harden categorical distinctions between body/spirit, animate/inanimate – in particular, the attacks of Reformists on the materiality of ‘dead’ idols, and the rationale of the new anatomy for publicly dissecting ‘dead’ bodies. The author contends that within this context, theatrical representations of the corpse or corpse/revenant – as seen here in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries – uniquely showcased the theatre's own ideological and performative agency.Less

The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts

Mark Thornton Burnett and Adrian Streete

This reference work explores the place of Shakespeare in relation to cultural processes that take in publishing, exhibiting, performing, reconstructing, and disseminating. The thirty commissioned ... More

This reference work explores the place of Shakespeare in relation to cultural processes that take in publishing, exhibiting, performing, reconstructing, and disseminating. The thirty commissioned chapters are divided into six sections: Shakespeare and the Book; Shakespeare and Music; Shakespeare on Stage and in Performance; Shakespeare and Youth Culture; Shakespeare, Visual and Material Culture; and Shakespeare, Media and Culture. Each chapter provides both a synthesis and a discussion of a topic, informed by current thinking and theoretical reflection. The book addresses Shakespeare in terms of a global frame of reference and responds to a growing critical and pedagogical interest in the relations between Shakespeare, the arts, film, performance, and mass media more generally.Less

The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare

Heather Hirschfeld

This book recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term “satisfaction” during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the term's significance as an ... More

This book recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term “satisfaction” during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the term's significance as an organizing principle of Christian repentance, the book examines the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatized the consequences of its re- or de-valuation in the process of Reformation doctrinal change. The Protestant theology of repentance, the book suggests, underwrote a variety of theatrical plots “to set things right” in a world shorn of the prospect of “making enough” (satisfacere). The book traces today's use of “satisfaction”-as an unexamined measure of inward gratification rather than a finely nuanced standard of relational exchange-to the pressures on legal, economic, and marital discourses wrought by the Protestant rejection of the Catholic sacrament of penance (contrition, confession, satisfaction) and represented imaginatively on the stage. In so doing, it offers fresh readings of the penitential economies of canonical plays including Dr. Faustus, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello; considers the doctrinal and generic importance of lesser-known plays including Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Love's Pilgrimage; and opens new avenues into the study of literature and repentance in early modern England.Less

Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature

Melissa E. Sanchez

This book demonstrates that if we treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century erotic literature as part of English political history, both fields of study will look rather different. This important new ... More

This book demonstrates that if we treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century erotic literature as part of English political history, both fields of study will look rather different. This important new book traces some surprising implications of two early modern commonplaces: first, that love is the basis of political consent and obedience, and second, that suffering is an intrinsic part of love. Rather than dismiss such commonplaces as mere convention, the book uncovers the political import of early modern literature’s fascination with erotic violence. Focusing on representations of masochism, sexual assault, and cross-gendered identification, the book re-examines the work of politically active writers from Philip Sidney to John Milton. It argues that political allegiance and consent appear far less conscious and deliberate than traditional historical narratives allow when Sidney depicts abjection as a source of both moral authority and sexual arousal; when Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare make it hard to distinguish between rape and seduction; when Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish depict women who adore treacherous or abusive lovers; when court masques stress the pleasures of enslavement; or when Milton insists that even Edenic marriage is hopelessly pervaded by aggression and self-loathing. The book shows that this literature constitutes an alternate tradition of political theory that acknowledges the irrational and perverse components of power and thereby disrupts more conventional accounts of politics as driven by self-interest, false consciousness, or brute force.Less