Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Domestic Sphere

Author(s):  
Catherine Richardson

This essay is about the relationship between comic form and domestic politics—about how Shakespeare makes comedy out of household encounters, and how his plays might have intervened in current political thinking about family life and gender relations. Bringing the plays into dialogue with a range of contemporary prescriptive literature about household practice, it argues that the relationship between comedy as a genre and the patriarchal ideals of domestic organization which structured early modern society was a turbulent one, and that this adds to the plays’ political purchase and their theatrical power. The essay looks in detail at relationships between household heads, children and parents, and servants and their masters, focusing on the qualities of submission and authority which Shakespeare develops in his verse and staging—it aims to answer the question, just how does he put domestic encounters on the early modern stage?

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pallavi Gaur ◽  
Dr Aradhana Balodi Bhardwaj

Introduction: Marital adjustment is gaining increasing concern in the modern society. Marital adjustment is a process during which partners in a marriage change and adapt to their new roles accompanying each other acting as a team different to two separate units. Levels of empathy and levels of forgiveness could be factors in determining a relationship with marital adjustment. Marital adjustment is an important predictor and factors like empathy and forgiveness that enhance the marital quality and marital satisfaction in a marriage can be studied as mediators of marital adjustment. High levels of empathy will have a positive relationship with marital adjustment. High levels of forgiveness will have a positive relationship with marital adjustment. Focusing on forgiveness and empathy as having a positive relationship with marital adjustment, it can be said the ability to forgive a partner and the willingness to grant forgiveness is on of the most important contributors to marital adjustment. Empathy between couples means having the ability to feel and understand the thoughts and emotions of the other partner. Having the ability to listen to and relating to the partner’s feelings is very important and this has a great impact on how the relationship works thereby affecting the levels of adjustment. Methods: The current study aimed at studying the relationship between empathy, forgiveness and marital adjustment in couples. The study was conducted on 80 married individuals, i.e, 40 married males and40 married females. It was hypothesized that higher levels of forgiveness would have a positive relationship with marital adjustment; higher levels of empathy would have a positive relationship with marital adjustment. It was also hypothesized that there would be significant gender differences in regard of forgiveness and empathy between couples. Results & Implications: The study reported that higher levels of empathy have a positive relationship with marital adjustment. On the dimensions of forgiveness also the study reported a positive relationship between forgiveness and marital adjustment. There were significant gender differences between males and females on the domains of empathy and forgiveness in a marital relationship. The study provides an opportunity for further research across age and gender to uncover the possible differences or similarities that may be present. Also it adds to the already existing data pool with equivocal studies.


Author(s):  
Aysha Pollnitz

In the early years of the 15th century, Renaissance humanists insisted that the capacity to translate texts from Greek and Hebrew into Latin, and later into and between vernacular tongues, was a critical aspect of grammar and rhetoric. When performed by students, schoolmasters claimed that translation and double translation facilitated eloquence in both languages. When performed by adepts, men and women of letters praised translation for transmitting texts to a new or wider readership, or to a more culturally and geographically specific one. Contemporaries regarded translations as literary works in their own right. As such, the translation of scripture became a flashpoint for controversy, particularly when Desiderius Erasmus’s Latin translation and annotations and Martin Luther’s German Bible encouraged religious reform and schism. Traditionally, scholarship on translation in this period has been dominated by studies of the transmission of the Renaissance or of religious reformation. There have been examinations of significant translators, such as Jacques Amyot, and of the way that the works of one major author, like Erasmus, were received in a specific locality. Scholars of the reformations have published significant studies of the scriptural translations of Erasmus, Luther, and Luther’s followers. In the 1970s, the new field of translation studies questioned whether it was ever possible to find real equivalences between languages and across cultures. This approach encouraged scholars to examine what was lost, gained, transformed, or created anew in an act of translation. More recently, a growing awareness of the historical contingency of acts of translation has encouraged interdisciplinary efforts to examine translation as a cultural event. The result of this historical turn has been a flowering of period-specific studies, series, and editions. Scholars of the Middle Ages have questioned the idea that Renaissance humanists’ translations represented a break from medieval efforts. Literary scholars and intellectual historians have examined early modern treatises on the theory of translation, as taught in schools and practiced by adepts. The identity of the translator has attracted the attention of scholars of literature and gender, in particular, since many early modern women’s literary productions were translations. A broader range of texts in translation—beyond classical and literary works and scripture—have been studied by historians of science, political and historical thought, and religion. Historians of the book have examined the relationship between translation and manuscript and print culture. The peripheries of translation culture are also being explored, and the world beyond Europe has become a focus, particularly in studies of missionary, commercial, and colonizing activities in Asia and the Atlantic.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Giannetti

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.


2015 ◽  
pp. 39-60
Author(s):  
Anita Abramowska-Kmon

The main aim of the paper was to analyse determinants of care for elderly parents provided by adult children in Poland. The data were from the first wave of the Polish Generations and Gender Survey (GGS-PL) carried out in 2010 and 2011. The logistic regression model with the dependent binary variable describing the fact of providing care to elderly mother or father has been applied. The obtained results are mostly in line with those described in the literature on this topic. Generally the probability of giving care to elderly parents increases with respondent’s age. Women have higher chances of providing care to older mother or father than men do. Persons better educated (with secondary or higher level of education) are characterized by higher probability of caring for elderly parents. Parameters estimates for several variables such as place of residence, living arrangements, employment status and health status were statistically insignificant. As it would have been anticipated health status of a parent significantly increases the probability of providing care to a mother or a father. Moreover, the better the relationship between children and parents, the higher chances of taking care of older parents. In addition, the more respondents agreed with the opinion of responsibility of children for care for elderly parents, the higher the risk of providing an instrumental help by them was.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Frazer

Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens are both read, in this chapter, as questioning the place of friendship in political societies and states. Classically, friendship, or friendly relations at least, between citizens has been understood as a condition of political stability; but in the early modern era an idea of friendship as a transcendent tie, indifferent to politics, and in tension with it was developing. Republican thought also questions the relationship between friendship and commerce, with some critics seeing these as antithetical, others seeing them as bound up together. Both of these plays problematize the dilemmas of exchange, of contract, of bonds in the sense of agreement and promise, in relation both to intimate ties, and to the authority of sovereign institutions. Merchant of Venice considers these matters in particular in relation to a society fissured by religious antagonism—by anti-semitism; both plays consider them in relation to a society marked by clear sex and gender distinction and exclusion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
I.A. Alikin ◽  
M.I. Alikin ◽  
N.V. Lukyanchenko

The authors focus on the controversial situation of a large number of theoretical and practical works on psychological aspects of education, the high importance of hardiness for productive life of individuals in modern society and the absence of works exploring how parents influence the formation of hardiness in their children. The paper presents results of the study of the relationship between hardiness in young male and female students and the features of their subjective childhood image of family and current attitudes of their parents. The sample of the study was 119 students (43 males and 76 females).Methodological support of the research included the following: Hardiness test (Hardiness Survey by S. Muddi, adapted by D.A. Leontiev); two scales of the BIV questionnaire (Biographisches Inventar zur Diagnose von Verhaltenstörungen) revealing the nature of childhood image of family; the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics technique assessing the key aspects of relationships. The results of the study showed that the level of hardiness in the subjects is closely related to the nature of their childhood images of family: the more positive the image is, the higher the hardiness. The relationship between hardiness and the current attitude of parents has both common and gender-specific trends. Parental care and high interest in preserving the child’s attachment impede the manifestation of hardiness in the young people. The gender specifics of those aspects of parental attitude that promote hardiness does not coincide with the generally accepted patterns.


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