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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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

The Face of Mammon studies the gold and silver coins of sixteenth‐century England as they are articulated in literary writing. Landreth argues that the coinage of the sixteenth century is a very different object from the money that we know—not only formally but conceptually, in that modern money is the object proper to a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape in the sixteenth century. Instead, a Renaissance coin is an arena contested among multiple early modern discourses that each seek to encompass it, such as ontology, ethics, and politics. The writers central to this study—among them Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Donne—use the coin to demonstrate the interdependence of these competing discourses as they converge upon a single, ubiquitous object. For these authors, an understanding of the world that humans make for themselves relies upon understanding how the material world is made. The small circumference of the coin brings these contending worlds into contact.

Faith in Shakespeare explains what it means to believe in Shakespeare’s plays, exploring how his plots can be both preposterous and gripping and his characters more substantial and enduring than the people surrounding us in the theater. Our experience can be partly explained by what Coleridge calls “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” The book explores poetic faith’s affinities and contrasts with religious faith, and it considers the recent return to religion in Shakespeare studies as well as speculation about Shakespeare’s own religious beliefs and their Reformation context. Nevertheless, Faith in Shakespeare concentrates on text over context, focusing on the afterlife of Shakespeare’s language more than theological controversies over the afterlife of spirits. The book confirms its convictions in literature’s intrinsic powers and explores the causes for our paradoxical belief in theater’s potent but manifest illusions. It shows how these illusions enlist our own imaginative cooperation by asking us to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” while responding with kindness and compassion towards the broader human imperfections of the actors, the playwright, and the characters they represent. Rather than faith in God or the supernatural, faith in Shakespeare is sustained and explained only by the complex, subtle and entirely human power of poetic eloquence and dramatic performance.

This book explores how sexual relationships between men were represented in English literature during the 17th century. The book is built around two principal themes: firstly the literary strategies through which writers created imagined spaces for the expression of homosexual desire; and secondly the ways in which such texts were subsequently edited and adapted to remove these references to sex between men. The book begins with a wide-ranging analysis of the forms in which both homosexual desire and homophobic hatred were expressed in the period, focusing on the problems of defining male relationships, the erotic dimension to male friendships, and the uses of classical settings. Subsequent chapters offer four case studies. The first focuses on how Shakespeare adapted his sources to introduce the possibility of sexual relations between male characters, with special attention to Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and the Sonnets, and shows how these elements were removed in later adaptations of his plays and poems. Subsequent chapters chart the often satirical representation of homosexual rulers from James I to William III; the ambiguous sexuality figured in the poetry of Andrew Marvell; and the libertine homoeroticism of the poetry of the Earl of Rochester. The book draws on a wide range of poems, plays, letters, and pamphlets, and discusses a substantial amount of previously unknown material from both printed and manuscript sources.

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages argues that ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on early modern England’s dramatic landscape. Drawing on original research to challenge longstanding assumptions about Greek texts’ invisibility, the book shows not only that the plays were more prominent than we have believed, but that early modern readers and audiences responded powerfully to specific plays and themes. The Greek plays most popular in the period were not male-centered dramas such as Sophocles’ Oedipus, but tragedies by Euripides that focused on raging bereaved mothers and sacrificial virgin daughters, especially Hecuba and Iphigenia. Because tragedy was firmly linked with its Greek origin in the period’s writings, these iconic female figures acquired a privileged status as synecdoches for the tragic theater and its ability to conjure sympathetic emotions in audiences. When Hamlet reflects on the moving power of tragic performance, he turns to the most prominent of these figures: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba/ That he should weep for her?” Through readings of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists, this book argues that newly visible Greek plays, identified with the origins of theatrical performance and represented by passionate female figures, challenged early modern writers to reimagine the affective possibilities of tragedy, comedy, and the emerging genre of tragicomedy.

Hamlet’s Moment reveals how plays written in the first decade of the seventeenth century were shaped by forms of professional political knowledge and the social promises such knowledge held. This argument presupposes that there was such a thing as a political profession, however loosely understood: that there was a career path associated with political employment that was assumed to be a means to social advancement, and that there was a recognizable body of knowledge and mode of thinking defining it. To illustrate this, the first half of the book focuses on Hamlet and its reflection on the conditions of political employment, the education and intellectual work required for advancement in political careers, and the characteristics of a politic style, arguing that in Shakespeare’s play, drama turns from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, and from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. The second half of the book turns to plays that follow in the wake of Shakespeare’s path-breaking tragedy. Plays written by Ben Jonson, John Marston, George Chapman and others invited the public to imagine what it meant to have a political career. In doing so, they transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use. The book suggests that the demand for this social asset was a driving force behind the burgeoning public discussion of the seventeeth century, and thus, behind the rise of the modern public sphere.

This book explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a ‘society of heirs’, in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose, and drama—in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser’s Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works—we encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The prominence of inheritance within this society cuts across conventional period distinctions. This book offers a literary history within which medieval and Renaissance writing are seen as a ‘premodern’ whole, set in opposition to the modern world that succeeded it, in which practices of inheritance are delegitimized without being fully abandoned. Imagining Inheritance thus argues that an exploration of the ways in which inheritance was imagined between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries makes legible the deep structures of power that modernity wants to forget.

This book proposes that certain qualities for which English Renaissance drama is famous, such as what Dryden called its ‘variety and greatness of characters’ and its ‘copiousness and well-knitting of intrigue’, may be in part attributable to the close relationship in this period between developments in English legal culture and those in dramatic writing. The book shows how the English justice system underwent changes in the 16th century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more ‘probable’. The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatis personae habitually gather evidence and ‘invent’ arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, thus prompting us, as readers and audience, to reconstruct this ‘evidence’ as stories of characters' private histories and inner lives. In this drama, people act in uncertainty, inferring one another's motives and testing evidence for their conclusions. This book thus provides an account of the transformation from allegorical to mimetic modes of drama that associates the latter with the gradual shift, in the judicial sphere, from penitential to evidential models of justice.

Shakespeare's late plays are usually seen in terms of courtliness and escapism. But the critical tradition has been too decorous. Neither neo-Christian pieties nor high-political allegory can account for the works' audacity and surprise, or the popular investment in both their form and meaning. Post-structuralist and historicist approaches show the indeterminacy and materiality of language, but rarely identify how particular figures (words and characters) capture and energize contested history. Recent criticism tends to put a pre-emptive ‘master-paradigm’ above all else; a more sinuous, minutely attentive critical vocabulary is needed to apprehend Shakespeare's turbulent, precise, teeming metaphorical discourse.

Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare asks why love is regarded as the highest human value in some cultural sectors—such as religion, literature and the arts—and is not even on the map in others—philosophy, law, and political thought. In the biblical vision, “love the neighbor” is both the law and a description of justice. And yet, while religious thinkers cannot conceive of justice without love, for political philosophers, justice and love belong in completely different spheres, rational and public vs. emotional and private. Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare engages with our dominant ideas of justice, including theories of contract, fair distribution, and retribution, and shows how they fall short without love. Shakespeare emerges as the carrier of this love tradition: his plays stage that justice must be driven by love—no mere private passion, but an understanding of care for one another, care that is central to a just world.

The reassessment of the ‘two cultures’ of art and science has been one of the most urgent areas of research in literary and historical studies over the last fifteen years. The early modern period is an ideal site for such an investigation precisely because of the pre-disciplinary nature of its science. The central focus of this book falls upon the wide-ranging practices of what will come to be called “science” prior to its separation into a realm of its own, one of the legacies of the renaissance and its encounter with modernity. This book offers a new critical examination of the complex and mutually-sustaining relationship between literature and science—and, more broadly, art and nature—in the early modern period. Redefining literature and art as knowledge-producing practices and, at the same time, recasting the practices of emergent science as imaginative and creative and literary, this book argues for a more complex understanding of early modern culture in which the scientific can be said to produce the literary and the literary can be said to produce the scientific. Drawing upon recent work in the field of science studies and focusing on selected works of major writers of the period—including Bacon, Donne, Galileo, and Shakespeare, among others—this book recovers a range of early modern discursive and cultural practices for a new account of the linked histories of science and literature.