Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare's Rome PDF Download

Author: Maria Del Sapio Garbero
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135192902X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Contributors to this collection delve into the relationship between Rome and Shakespeare. They view the presence of Rome in Shakespeare's plays not simply as an unquestioned model of imperial culture, or a routine chapter in the history of literary influence, but rather as the problematic link with a distant and foreign ancestry which is both revered and ravaged in its translation into the terms of the Bard's own cultural moment. During a time when England was engaged in constructing a rhetoric of imperial nationhood, the contributors demonstrate that Englishmen used Roman history and the classical heritage to mediate a complex range of issues, from notions of cultural identity and gender to the representation of systems of exchange with Otherness in the expanding ethnic space of the nation. This volume addresses matters of concern not only for Shakespeare scholars but also for students interested in issues connected with gender, postcolonialism and globalization. Drawing implicitly or explicitly on recent criticism (intertextual studies, postcolonial theory, Derrida's conceptualization of hospitality, gender studies, global studies) the essayists explore how the Roman Shakespeare of an emerging early modern empire asks questions of our present as well as of our past.

Author: Domenico Lovascio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514059
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

Author: Maria Del Sapio Garbero
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000531597
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Rome was tantamount to its ruins, a dismembered body, to the eyes of those – Italians and foreigners – who visited the city in the years prior to or encompassing the lengthy span of the Renaissance. Drawing on the double movement of archaeological exploration and creative reconstruction entailed in the humanist endeavour to ‘resurrect’ the past, ‘ruins’ are seen as taking precedence over ‘myth’, in Shakespeare’s Rome. They are assigned the role of a heuristic model, and discovered in all their epistemic relevance in Shakespeare’s dramatic vision of history and his negotiation of modernity. This is the first book of its kind to address Shakespeare’s relationship with Rome’s authoritative myth, archaeologically, by taking as a point of departure a chronological reversal, namely the vision of the ‘eternal’ city as a ruinous scenario and hence the ways in which such a layered, ‘silent’, and aporetic scenario allows for an archaeo-anatomical approach to Shakespeare’s Roman works.

Author: Domenico Lovascio
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526157373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
John Fletcher’s Rome is the first book to explore John Fletcher’s engagement with classical antiquity. Like Shakespeare and Jonson, Fletcher wrote, alone or in collaboration, a number of Roman plays: Bonduca, Valentinian, The False One and The Prophetess. Unlike Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s, however, Fletcher’s Roman plays have seldom been the subject of critical discussion. Domenico Lovascio’s ground-breaking study examines these plays as a group for the first time, thus identifying disorientation as the unifying principle of Fletcher’s portrayal of imperial Rome. John Fletcher’s Rome argues that Fletcher’s dramatization of ancient Rome exudes a sense of detachment and scepticism as to the authority of Roman models resulting from his irreverent approach to the classics. The book sheds new light on Fletcher’s intellectual life, his vision of history, and the interconnections between these plays and the rest of his canon.

Author: Irena Makaryk
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442698381
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Shakespeare’s works occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both the high and the low, the national and the foreign, literature and theatre. The Second World War presents a fascinating case study of this phenomenon: most, if not all, of its combatants have laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society’s self-image. In wartime, such claims frequently brought to the fore a crisis of cultural identity and of competing ownership of this ‘universal’ author. Despite this, the role of Shakespeare during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth. Shakespeare and the Second World War provides the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain. The essays demonstrate how the wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare has been recycled, reviewed, and reinterpreted from 1939–1945 are both illuminated by and continue to illuminate the War today.

Author: Eric Dodson-Robinson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004401288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Eric Dodson-Robinson’s Revenge, Agency, and Identity from European Drama to Asian Film challenges critical readings that downplay agency. From Attic tragedy, through Seneca and Shakespeare, and into Japanese and Korean film, the book pursues the agent of vengeance: a complex agent who strives for excess, not equivalence.

Author: Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317071719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617 is the first book to consider railing plays and pamphlets as participating in a coherent literary movement that dominated much of the English literary landscape during the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. Author Prendergast considers how these crisis-ridden texts on religious, gender, and aesthetic controversies were encouraged and supported by the emergence of the professional theater and print pamphlets. She argues that railing texts by Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson, Jane Anger and others became sites for articulating anxious emotions-including fears about the stability of England after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the increasing factional splits between Protestant groups. But, given that railings about religious and political matters often led to censorship or even death, most railing writers chose to circumvent such possible repercussions by railing against unconventional gender identity, perverse sexual proclivities, and controversial aesthetics. In the process, Prendergast argues, railers shaped an anti-aesthetics that was itself dependent on the very expressions of perverse gender and sexuality that they discursively condemned, an aesthetics that created a conceptual third space in which bitter enemies-male or female, conformist or nonconformist-could bond by engaging in collaborative experiments with dialogical invective. By considering a literary mode of articulation that vehemently counters dominant literary discourse, this book changes the way that we look at late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literature, as it associates works that have been studied in isolation from each other with a larger, coherent literary movement.

Author: Maria Del Sapio Garbero
Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH
ISBN: 3899717406
Category : Aufsatzsammlung
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Ancient Rome has always been considered a compendium of City and World. In the Renaissance, an era of epistemic fractures, when the clash between the 'new science' (Copernicus, Galileo, Vesalius, Bacon, etcetera) and the authority of ancient texts produced the very notion of modernity, the extended and expanding geography of ancient Rome becomes, for Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, a privileged arena in which to question the nature of bodies and the place they hold in a changing order of the universe. Drawing on the rich scenario provided by Shakespeare's Rome, and adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the authors of this volume address the way in which the different bodies of the earthly and heavenly spheres are re-mapped in Shakespeare's time and in early modern European culture. More precisely, they investigate the way bodies are fashioned to suit or deconstruct a culturally articulated system of analogies between earth and heaven, microcosm and macrocosm. As a whole, this collection brings to the fore a wide range of issues connected to the Renaissance re-mapping of the world and the human. It should interest not only Shakespeare scholars but all those working on the interaction between sciences and humanities.

Author: Christopher Ivic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472525833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The Arden Shakespeare Dictionary on Shakespeare and National Identity makes a timely and valuable contribution to the discipline. National identity in the early modern period is a central topic of scholarly investigation; it is also a dominant topic in classroom instruction and discussion. More than any other early modern playwright, Shakespeare (especially his history plays) is at the heart of recent critical investigations into a host of relevant topics: borders, history, identity, land, memory, nation, place and space. This Dictionary works through Shakespeare's plays and the cultural moment in which they were produced to provide a rich and informative account of such topics. An ideal reference work for upper level students and scholars and an essential resource for any literary library.

Author: Michael Neill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191036145
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 650

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy is a collection of fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world, bringing together some of the best-known writers in the field with a strong selection of younger Shakespeareans. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The collection is organised in five sections. The substantial opening section introduces the plays by placing them in a variety of illuminating contexts: as well looking at ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, it addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past, by considering tragedy's relationship to other genres (including history plays, tragicomedy, and satiric drama), and by showing how Shakespeare's tragedies respond to the pressures of early modern politics, religion, and ideas about humanity and the natural world. The second section is devoted to current textual issues; while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies, from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with the extraordinary diversity of twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The thirteen essays of the book's final section seek to expand readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia. Offering the richest and most diverse collection of approaches to Shakespearean tragedy currently available, the Handbook will be an indispensable resource for students both undergraduate and graduate levels, while the lively and provocative character of its essays make will it required reading for teachers of Shakespeare everywhere.