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Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in History
Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell
Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell
Student Scholar Showcase
While William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets have been discussed time and time again over the past few centuries, one topic that has been less traversed is the connection between his Comedies and Niccolò Machiavelli’s political ideologies. This project will explore references of lions and foxes in Shakespeare’s Comedies and the leaders and monarchs within them to determine how beliefs about Machiavelli’s political ideology influenced Shakespeare’s literature and became symbols for leadership and power. This project will be important for gaining historical context on Machiavellian political discourse and how it was represented in the contemporary dramatic literature of William Shakespeare. I …
In This Harsh World, We Continue To Draw Breath: Queer Persistence In Shakespeare And Hamlet, Beck O. Adelante
In This Harsh World, We Continue To Draw Breath: Queer Persistence In Shakespeare And Hamlet, Beck O. Adelante
Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship
Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and most often (mis-)quoted works. The central and titular character has likewise been an endless source of academic and artistic inquiry and exploration since nearly the creation of the work itself. However, this paper argues that a crucial and enlightening piece of the puzzle has, until recently, been left unexplored for the most part, considered a frivolous or non-serious pursuit: Hamlet’s and Hamlet’s queerness. Using historical research and evidence, close readings of the text, and examples of recent productions that have taken this element seriously, this paper argues that to fully understand the …
Wherein To Catch The Conscience Of The Queen: Dystopian Politics In Elizabethan Drama, Helen Fielding
Wherein To Catch The Conscience Of The Queen: Dystopian Politics In Elizabethan Drama, Helen Fielding
Senior Honors Theses
Though established English history portrays Elizabeth I (1533-1603) as uniting England under the new Protestant religion, recent historical evidence reveals that extensive counter-currents still existed. This thesis examines how the politico-religious beliefs of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights manifest themselves in their drama, particularly through imagery and allusions. It draws especially from Frances Yates to assert that imagery of white magic, Christian Cabala, and alchemy in these dramatists’ works refers to the pure imperial reform movement of Elizabeth’s reign, and also from Clare Asquith to illuminate a reading of Shakespeare as a playwright who encoded in his plays a Catholic message …
Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc
Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc
History Honors Papers
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …
Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie
Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by …
Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie
Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness …
Reading With The Grain: On Vin Nardizzi’S Wooden Os: Shakespeare’S Theatres And England’S Trees, Steven Swarbrick
Reading With The Grain: On Vin Nardizzi’S Wooden Os: Shakespeare’S Theatres And England’S Trees, Steven Swarbrick
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Rules Of Misrule, Meghan Forgione
Rules Of Misrule, Meghan Forgione
Honors Scholar Theses
The project seeks to offer an alternative interpretation of sport culture in Renaissance England with respect to theater and football. I seek to show how sport culture, although seemingly threatening to the state, actually reinforces the monarchy due to its ability to provide the people with a controlled social release. The prose explores the function of carnival in sport culture and the way in which the two are manifested in football and theater in the Renaissance.
Taking Liberties, Matt Kozusko
Taking Liberties, Matt Kozusko
English Faculty Publications
The 'place' scholars have assigned to the stage in early modern London is as much a reflection of the procedures of contemporary literary criticism as a reflection of the cultural function of popular drama in the early modern period. Modern critics are often not engaged in re-examining available data, preferring instead to rest on a conjectural paradigm or heuristic that has hardened, over the past couple of decades, into a New Historicist version of 'fact'. Critics have collapsed boundaries and important distinctions in London jurisdiction and geography in the interest of a unified critical narrative that characterizes the theatre as …
Phantastes Chapter 14: Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare
Phantastes Chapter 14: Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare
German Romantic and Other Influences
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Winter’s Tale, published in 1623 in the First Folio.
Phantastes Chapter 20: The Faithful Shepherdess, John Fletcher
Phantastes Chapter 20: The Faithful Shepherdess, John Fletcher
German Romantic and Other Influences
John Fletcher (1579-1625) was a contemporary of William Shakespeare and followed him as main playwright for the King’s Men. The Faithful Shepherdess (produced in 1608, probably published in 1609) is also important for Fletcher’s definition of tragicomedy, which highlights the importance of near-death to the genre.
Phantastes Chapter 22: The Revenger's Tragedy, Cyril Tourneur
Phantastes Chapter 22: The Revenger's Tragedy, Cyril Tourneur
German Romantic and Other Influences
Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626) was an English dramatist, a contemporary of Shakespeare; Tourneur was also a soldier and politician. The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), as its name implies, is a revenge tragedy, and comments on the battle to avenge the destruction by the giants that lead to the brothers’ deaths. Literary critics now believe that the play was written by Thomas Middleton (1580-1627).