Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

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.

The Alliance of Seriousness and Levity in As You Like It

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Prose Romance ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Shakespeare's As You Like It. The play is very similar in the way it moves to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labour's Lost, despite the fact that its plot is taken over almost entirely from Lodge's Rosalynde. It argues that the reality we feel about the experience of love in the play, reality which is not in the pleasant little prose romance, comes from presenting what was sentimental extremity as impulsive extravagance and so leaving judgment free to mock what the heart embraces. The Forest of Arden, like the Wood outside Athens, is a region defined by an attitude of liberty from ordinary limitations, a festive place where the folly of romance can have its day.

Shakespearean Comedy and the Senses

2018 ◽  
pp. 235-249
Author(s):  
Kevin Curran
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Powerful Source ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Senses

In Shakespeare’s comedies, sensation is both a problem and a solution. It is the source of division and the grounds of unity. This paradox is consistent with the early modern period’s mixed conception of the senses. If antitheatrical tracts and clerical literature denounced sensory experience as an impediment to truth and spiritual understanding, printed defences of theatre and a variety of medical and psychological tracts treated the senses as a powerful source of knowledge and judgement. This essay traces how Shakespeare’s treatment of the senses relates to both of these traditions. It addresses the connection between this double rendering of sensation and comic form and concludes by considering the ethical implications of sensory experience in the theatre. Examples are drawn from a variety of plays, including The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It.

Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Ability To Act

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.

scholarly journals Making Amends: The Transformation of Theseus and the Feminization of Marriage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Charles Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Love ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Way

This study of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream asks why Theseus changes his mind about forbidding the marriage of Hermia and Lysander and what this change means for the view of marriage developed in the play and for the experience of art which the play engenders. By emphasizing the love of women for each other, the vows of sisterhood and the cult of Diana, the play prepares the way for Theseus’ change of mind and for the feminization of marriage and the celebration of imagination with which the play ends. We can observe these emphases in patterns of language and imagery (especially the flower motif), in metaphors and allusions and in descriptions of the union of opposites. The interplay of chaste love and desire delineates the art of metaphor and drama which the audience must grasp to fully appreciate the play. In Acts 4 and 5 Theseus’ resistance to romantic love melts away, along with his opposition to the imagination. Thus, during the wedding feast of Act 5, Theseus defends the amateur theatrics of the workmen as being excellent «if imagination amend them» (5.1.209); and he is associated in his language and ideas with Puck, the most fantastic and transformative character in the play. Theseus is himself transformed from the seducer and betrayer of women described in 2.1.77-80 into a worthy husband for Hippolyta, one who meets her halfway in her respect for the visions of lovers and poets. 

scholarly journals Néhány megjegyzés Heltai imádságos könyvének utóéletéről

2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihály Balázs
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Considerable Length ◽  
The Way

Although in recent years there has been an upsurge in the research of the history of early modern spirituality, this research has paid hardly any attention to the Unitarian denomination. The reasons for this lie beyond the scope of the present study: between the late 16th century and the late 18th century the denomination had to refrain from the use of printing, and thus, the manuscript versions of prayer texts were threatened by loss and destruction. It is a unique paradox, however, that the first edited protestant Hungarian prayer book of considerable length was published precisely by this denomination in 1570/1571. The first part of the paper explores the concept of the prayer book based on Johann Habermann’s famous Gebetbüchlein, and compares it to the greatest achievements of the same sort within this period, the Catholic Péter Pázmány’s and the Calvinist Albert Szenci Molnár’s works. This section is followed by a survey of the vivid reception of Heltai’s work, with particular focus on the way the Unitarian author’s work was used in the Lutheran community of Lőcse. The concluding part argues that building on the foundations of this tradition, as well as on the heritage of Calvinist prayer culture, an unparalleled Unitarian prayer literature developed in the 17th-18th centuries, which deserves the attention of comparative research.

The Manifestation of Desire

2021 ◽  
pp. 120-147
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Way

Chapter 4 conceptualizes the device of ‘manifestation,’ the term identifying the causal power of desires, thoughts, and words to call forth objects and even characters in Shakespeare’s comic world. In the spirit of critic Elena Zupančič, the device shows, among other things, the way that comedy can surface the amusing monstrousness and presumptuousness of human wishes. The concept of manifestation entails various literary and dramatic values that characterize Shakespearean comedy. Historically, it reflects interests and theories found in Renaissance treatises on magic, and it even parallels certain modern-day linguistic patters. The chapter formalizes and theorizes the device, drawing examples from a range of comedies. The Comedy of Errors (Dr. Pinch), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Helana and the love potion), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (the Witch of Brainford) come in for special discussion. The chapter ends by situation manifestation in relation to entrance effects in medieval and Tudor drama and to allegorical effects in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

As You Like It

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Shaughnessy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Performance History ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sexual Ambiguity ◽  
The Rich ◽  
And Gender

This book examines the modern performance history of one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most enduring comedies, and one that has given opportunities for generations of theatre-makers and theatre-goers to explore the pleasures of pastoral, gender masquerade and sexual ambiguity. Powered by Shakespeare’s greatest female comic role, the play invites us into a deeply English woodland that has also been imagined as a space of dreams. Beginning with the situation of the play in the context of early modern rehearsal and theatre practice, the book’s seven chapters successively examine the rich interplay between performance histories, changing relations with the natural world, and gender politics.

The Humours in Humour

2018 ◽  
pp. 219-235
Author(s):  
Matthew Steggle
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Humoral Theory ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Relationship

Did Shakespeare believe in the four humours? And did he write ‘humours comedy’? To address these questions, this chapter suggests that humoral theory is intimately bound up with early modern ideas of selfhood, not merely as a metaphor, but as a literal understanding of the processes at work in cognition, emotion, and selfhood. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular, is taken as a case study for how Shakespearean comedy understands the relationship between mind and body. Next, it re-examines the idea of ‘humours comedy’, arguing that we should see the true Shakespearean ‘comedy of humours’ in plays that celebrate not the fixity of identity, but its fluidity within a sentient body conceived of in terms of humours theory. The chapter takes as its closing case study The Comedy of Errors, suggesting that it, and Shakespearean comedy more generally, engages through the humours ideas of selfhood as mutable, communicable, and liquid.

Female Prologues and Epilogues in English Plays

PMLA ◽  
1933 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 1060-1079 ◽  
Author(s):  
Autrey Nell Wiley
Keyword(s):  
Great Change ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

The orator in petticoats often launched her plays with such audacity that she eclipsed the glory of the Prologue-monsieur and established the vogue of a particular kind of stage-oration which the poets called “She-Prologues” or “Female Prologues and Epilogues.” For her, Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Suckling, Dryden, Congreve, and many lesser playwrights wrote feminine orations; and as she pleaded her customary theme, “for my sake,” she made herself mistress of an art that won applause for As You Like It, Love for Love, The Way of the World, Cato, and more than two hundred other plays before 1714. A tall woman of her tongue was the She-Prologue; yet no one, I believe, has told the history of her addresses, the history of a particular type of playhouse-discourse with a vogue that touches upon the great change in the theatre resulting from the employment of actresses. Witty, saucy, beautiful, she and her playhouse-sisters with a gift for oratory harangued the pit and gallery for more than half a century: Nell 'neath a big hat, like a bug under a leaf; Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle, true friends to Betterton; yes, more than twenty other women—prattling sometimes, sometimes discoursing—circumscribed the matter and manner of the female prologue or epilogue, an address by a female orator of the stage.

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