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Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Shakespeare may not be better understood as a medieval writer exactly but beginning with the assumption that he belongs to a distinctively Renaissance period can obliterate legacies that are integral to his writing and thinking.
In addition, it also excludes medievalists from the interpretation of works that are affected profoundly by earlier sets of values and conventions or that simply do not fit within a strict conceptualisation of period-boundaries. Jones demonstrated how much Shakespeare learned from his medieval forebears: It was this vision of temporal authority that pervaded the great civic theatre of the mystery cycles, informing its often troubling account of the vulpine nature of kings and magistrates and the consequent vulnerability of subjects to their predations. It was this dramatic tradition that most influenced Shakespeare and it offered a wide range of theatrical situations and experiences to draw upon in his often pitiless examination of the pursuit and exercise of authority.
Again, when Shakespeare appeared most forward-looking he was actually looking back. The two collections of essays under review offer an opportunity to consider what kinds of questions and dissatisfactions drive this research and to clarify what difference it makes to perceive Shakespeare in terms of a medieval rather than an early modern world.
This is especially apparent in terms of the residual power of assumptions concerning the medieval period and the contrasting modernity of Shakespeare that still underlies even the analysis that sets out to overturn this. The first approach is less interested in questioning received approaches to periodisation and instead emphasises how Shakespeare and others understood the distinctiveness of the medieval past, principally in historical drama. In its self-conscious attention to these crucial differences — such as the chantries Henry has founded to pray for the soul of Richard II — Henry V demonstrates a sharp awareness of historical distinction and transformation.
It is also attentive to the different ways in which the past is construed and disseminated as different sets of protagonists apprehend it in their own ways.
The commentary of the Chorus also reminds us of the uniqueness of the theatre as a performative medium within which the past is recreated. Curtis Perry has granted himself some welcome editorial largesse to consider how variously historical dramatists aside from Shakespeare recreated the medieval period. The aim is to remind us of the heterogeneous and conflicting ways in which the medieval past was imagined, especially in terms of national identity.
The plays considered by Perry emphasise the ancient liberties associated with localities and the power this gives them to resist conquest and invasion. The subject-matter of the essay is fresh and handled interestingly and it is good to see non-canonical theatre given such attention.
donnsboatshop.com: Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings () . Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, eds., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or.
In these essays the core issue is, in essence, continuity. Yet as Perry and Watkins point out in their introduction, many of the historical features and social processes that are thought of as constitutive of early modernity — for example, market capitalism — were present in the medieval world. This idea broaches the intriguing possibility of considering how medieval and Renaissance theatre explored shared experiences rather than seeing the latter as brought into being by a wholly new set of forces.
In a sophisticated argument, Kuskin stresses how our understanding of book history needs to acknowledge the importance of paradox and recursive returns rather being founded on a linear narrative of singularity and progress. A linear concept of literary and printing history obscures dependencies and recursive exchanges across time, for example, between manuscript and print culture as well as the concern with textuality Shakespeare shares with fifteenth-century writing. The latter play relies extensively on emblematic characters and morally polarised situations and the roles of Kent, Fool and Edgar are especially indebted to morality conventions.
Still, the reading itself is resourceful, remarkably so in many ways, in its attention to the rhetorical complexity of the poem combined with a reading of its relationship to economic discourses of property-relations and commodification. At times, the theoretical density of the argument does over-burden the poem with an excessive amount of conceptual and historical significance. The core argument is that love complaint expresses a new form of productive social power to transform existing circumstances.
The concluding thesis, influenced principally by Gayatri Spivack, is a provocative one: Still, the essay is full of energy and interest although it seems wedded to tracing the ways in which this text does indeed mark ruptures and transitions that point towards modernity. In the play, the sacramental speech associated with penance and marriage is now articulated in wholly public and secular contexts and this reveals the power of these speech-acts both to create and, as Shylock discovers, to destroy persons and their social relationship to each other.
In another essay concerned with questions of social identity in transition, Patrick Cheney turns his attention to the question of authorship. His argument is that Shakespeare understood that he was increasingly seen as the heir to both Chaucer and Spenser and self-consciously sought to be acknowledged as such. However, he differs radically from Chaucer in displacing the singularity of this voice. In this way, Shakespeare combines, or rather effects, a transition between two key strategies of authorial self-presentation: In the process, he supersedes both models in his own quest for acknowledgement as National Poet.
In The Merchant , the vexed relationship between a number of moral claims — mercy and justice; mercantilism and morality — are shown to have numerous correspondences with the narratives found in the Gesta as are the core narrative devices of the bonds agreed in the play and the use of the casket-story. Both these essays are suggestive rather than wholly convincing. Yet it is notable how the residual power of early modernity as a temporal category and, indeed, its medieval precursor is still felt in these essays. Many of them insist both on the significance of the forms and traditions inherited by Shakespeare and also how profoundly these were transformed in new directions.
This involves abandoning the perspective of salvation history which would order and interpret these from a larger metaphysical perspective.