The Old King and the Elder Brother: As You Like It, Scripture, and the Problem of Political Resistance

Reformation ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-174
Author(s):  
David K. Anderson
Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.


Author(s):  
John Kerrigan

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.


Author(s):  
Bernard Capp

This chapter introduces the issues, surveys briefly the existing literature, and sets out the scope of the book. It summarizes contemporary views on the appropriate relationship between siblings, especially the rights and responsibilities of an elder brother towards his sisters and younger brothers. Contemporaries saw these as grounded in both nature and scripture, but recognized too the strength of sibling rivalries and resentments over favouritism and inheritance. These were often explored in contemporary drama, such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It and King Lear, and in social commentaries and polemic. The imagery of brotherhood and sisterhood pervaded the language as well as literature of the period, both as tokens of friendship and (in the case of elder/younger brothers) of oppression within the family. In language as in life, the sibling relationship was a heated and divisive issue for both parents and children.


Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge

The Introduction begins by noting the frequency and ease with which Bonhoeffer is mentioned in contemporary conversations about political resistance. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to derive from these appeals to Bonhoeffer any clear sense of the legacy of his political resistance. This raises the question: What did Bonhoeffer actually say about political resistance? Noting that Bonhoeffer spoke about political life primarily as a Christian pastor and Lutheran theologian, the Introduction sets forth the task of the book, which is a presentation of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking in the broader context of his theology. As summarized in the Introduction, this book presents Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking chronologically according to three phases of development and systematically according to a sixfold typology of resistance.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110351
Author(s):  
Katariina Kaura-aho

This article analyses the aesthetics of silent political resistance by focusing on refugees’ silent political action. The starting point for the analysis is Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and his theorisation of the aesthetics of politics. The article enquires into the aesthetic meaning of silent refugee activism and interprets how refugees’ silent acts of resistance can constitute aesthetically effective resistance to what can be called the ‘speech system’ of statist, representative democracy. The article analyses silence as a political tactic and interprets the emancipatory meaning of silent politics for refugees. It argues that refugees’ silent acts of political resistance can powerfully affect aesthetic, political subversion in prevailing legal-political contexts.


Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-201
Author(s):  
Andrew Majeske

Abstract This essay initially identifies and explores issues relating to relativity and relativism in cultural and political matters. It highlights the problematic character of the prime virtue that liberals claim to be the product of this relativistic outlook, tolerance, and points out that relativism equally supports illiberal agendas, as emphasized by Benito Mussolini. The essay then examines Shakespeare’s profound treatment of relativity in his As You Like It, focusing especially upon Rosalind and Orlando’s riddle exchange in Act 3, Scene 2, and the related sequencing of Orlando’s poems. In closing, the essay attempts to show how the West could benefit from revisiting great works of Western literature such as As You Like It, as it grapples with its moral crisis, works which plumbed the depths of the very problems we face today. But we will only garner from these texts the lessons we truly need to learn if we set aside, if only provisionally, the historicist assumptions which have blinded us to the contemporary pertinence and value of an older wisdom which by all appearances is more profound than our own.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke

This article marks a beginning at tracing the links between Near Eastern and African Islamic resistance, through an analysis of the ways in which Pan-Islamic agents from Egypt sought to intervene in support of indigenous Moroccan efforts to resist French imperialism during the period 1900 to 1912. The first section explores the general patterns of Pan-Islamic ideology and political action, and places the study of Pan-Islam in the context of studies of African resistance to imperialism. Succeeding sections review Moroccan relations with the Near East, trace the stages of growing Near Eastern involvement in support of Moroccan resistance, which culminated in an abortive general rising in 1912, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of Pan-Islam as a transitional movement of political resistance to imperialism.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-60
Author(s):  
Renante D. Pilapil

This article examines the critical potential of Honneth’s theory or ethics of recognition by raising two concerns as regards the success of such a project. Firstly, this article argues that Honneth’s ethical turn in critical theory might not be completely warranted and that there are good reasons to supplement his theory of recognition with an account of justificatory practices. Secondly, it argues that the complexity of the beginnings of political resistance proves that an explanative gap remains to be filled to account for the way in which personal experience of disrespect can be transformed into a collective struggle for recognition. By way of conclusion, this article posits that instead of rejecting the critical potential of Honneth’s theory, the concerns raised therein are invitations to specify his theory further, so that contemporary struggles for recognition can be understood more profoundly.


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