Shakespeare And The Medieval World

Author : Helen Cooper
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1408138980
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare and the Medieval World written by Helen Cooper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helen Cooper's unique study examines how continuations of medieval culture into the early modern period, forged Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and poet. Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

Author : Ruth Morse
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107016274
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Medieval Shakespeare written by Ruth Morse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives readers the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare from the perspectives of the late-medieval European traditions that surrounded him.

Author : Martha W. Driver
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786491655
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare and the Middle Ages written by Martha W. Driver and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.

Author : Helen Cooper
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1408138999
Total Pages : 375 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare and the Medieval World written by Helen Cooper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helen Cooper's unique study examines how continuations of medieval culture into the early modern period, forged Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and poet. Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.

Author : Helen Cooper
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521683068
Total Pages : 39 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare and the Middle Ages written by Helen Cooper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-13 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helen Cooper's inaugural lecture traces the influence of medieval literature on the Renaissance, particularly in Shakespeare's work.

Author : Kurt A. Schreyer
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 080145509X
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare's Medieval Craft written by Kurt A. Schreyer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare’s connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city’s cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects—as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors—to the Shakespearean stage.As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare’s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare’s stage—including the ass’s head of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth—were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.

Author : Curtis Perry
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199558175
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare and the Middle Ages written by Curtis Perry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-07 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Middle Ages brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them with the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern world: almost all of the histories depict events during the Hundred Years War, and King John glances even further back to the thirteenth-century Angevins; several of the comedies, tragedies, and romances rest on medieval sources; and there are important medieval antecedents for some of the poetic modes in which he worked as well. Several of the essays reread Shakespeare by recovering aspects of his works that are derived from medieval traditions and whose significance has been obscured by the desire to read Shakespeare as the origin of the modern. These essays, taken cumulatively, challenge the idea of any decisive break between the medieval period and early modernity by demonstrating continuities of form and imagination that clearly bridge the gap. Other essays explore the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries constructed or imagined relationships between past and present. Attending to the way these writers thought about their relationship to the past makes it possible, in turn, to read against the grain of our own teleological investment in the idea of early modernity. A third group of essays reads texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as documents participating in social-cultural transformation from within. This means attending to the way they themselves grapples with the problem of change, attempting to respond to new conditions and pressures while holding onto customary habits of thought and imagination. Taken together, the essays in this volume revisit the very idea of transition in a refreshingly non-teleological way.

Author : Alfred Thomas
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319902180
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages written by Alfred Thomas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Author : Peter Whitfield
Publisher : Bodleian Library
ISBN 13 : 9781851242573
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mapping Shakespeare's World written by Peter Whitfield and published by Bodleian Library. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The locations of Shakespeare s plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London which he and his audience inhabited, but always in places remote in space or time. How much did he and his contemporaries know about the foreign cities where the plays took place? What expectations did an audience have if the curtain rose on a drama which claimed to take place in Verona, Elsinore, Alexandria or ancient Troy? This fully illustrated book explores these questions, surveying Shakespeare s world through contemporary maps, geographical texts, paintings and drawings. The results are intriguing and sometimes surprising. Why should Love s Labour s Lost be set in the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre? Was the Forest of Arden really in Warwickshire? Why do two utterly different plays like The Comedy of Errors and Pericles focus strongly on ancient Ephesus? Where was Illyria? Did the Merry Wives have to live in Windsor? Why did Shakespeare sometimes shift the settings of the plays from those he found in his literary sources? It has always been easy to say that wherever the plays are set, Shakespeare was really writing about human psychology and human nature, and that the settings are irrelevant. This book takes a different view, showing that many of his locations may have had resonances which an Elizabethan audience would pick up and understand, and it shows how significant the geographical background of the plays could be. "

Author : David Scott Kastan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521786515
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare and the Book written by David Scott Kastan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-20 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of Shakespeare's plays as they were transformed from scripts into books.