Personification and the Political Imagination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2016 ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Amanda Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, consciousness, agency, and embodiment are not always in concert. Legal personification serves as the backdrop of my discussion of Bottom’s metamorphosis, which I see as evocative of developments within common law around the creation of artificial persons. In early modern jurisprudence, disembodiment offered an occasion for incorporation, such that the non-consensual human could be transformed into an artificial entity with agentic capacity. Through the staging of metamorphosis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream elaborates the surreal transformation of the human into the non-human as a theatrical effect with political implications, insofar as personification is an enabling condition of the collective rather than a crisis of the individual. The play’s sensitivity to artificial assemblage puts it in conversation with a strand of contemporary political thought interested in the complexity of the will beyond the human body.

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.

scholarly journals Gender Alterations in English and French Modernist “Bluebeard” Fairytale

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Dmytriieva Valeriia
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Psychological Changes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Early Modern Time ◽  
French And English

<p>The article is aimed at scrutinizing a variety of modernistic writings in a Bluebeard fairytale tradition. It is intended to show what is to be gained by studying texts in relation to the contexts in which they were produced. The period considered here is that of the late XIX and early XX centuries. This takes us into discussing patriarchal authority in the political thought of the early modern time in France and that of the Victorian England.The “Bluebeard” fairytale changes in the domain of gender as a response to certain historical and psychological changes are analyzed. A wide range of writings is investigated to reveal the contribution made by the French and English authors in the field of literature. The analysis implies that certain feministic ideas which grew out of social changes in the society of France and England have provoked some archetypal alterations in the texts of French and English modernists.</p>

Snaring Statutes and the General Pardon in the Gesta Grayorum

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-97
Author(s):  
Virginia Lee Strain
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Chapter 2 examines the Gesta Grayorum, an account of the 1594-5 Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn, one of the English common-law societies and educational institutions. The Christmas revelers mounted a large mock court, and the elaborate entertainments for their fictional Prince of Purpoole were performed by and before a community of Inn members and associates that included common-law students, legal professionals, courtiers, parliamentarians, and statesmen. In their abridged parliament, they mock the general pardon that historically compensated for the numerous ‘snaring’ statutes that had accrued over the course of the sixteenth century. These statutes, which turned subjects into unintentional lawbreakers, found their way into Shakespeare’s comedies, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Comedy of Errors, and John Donne’s satires. In parodying the terms and structure of the Elizabethan general pardon, the revelers target a legal-political device that publicly forgave select statutory infractions and broadcasted the sovereign’s merciful character. If the revels open with a mock parliament, Francis Bacon’s subsequent orations on government redirect the entertainments away from the comical errors of lawmakers and legal representatives toward the systematic reform of the fictional state.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Conclusion—Rousseau’s paradox

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.

From Liberties to Liberty

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-130
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
House Church ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

This chapter studies how liberty in the law evolved from being attached to a collective, metaphorical body—the medieval corporation—to being rooted instead in the individual body across a range of practices in seventeenth century Europe. It analyses the early modern forms of toleration that developed from the ground-up in Protestant Europe (Holland and Germany in particular), including the practices of ‘walking out’ (auslauf) to worship one’s God, and the house church (schuilkerk). These practices were key to delinking liberty from place, and thus to paving the way to attaching it instead to territory and the state. The chapter also considers the first common law of naturalisation, known as Calvin’s Case (1608), which wrote into the law the process of becoming an English subject—of subjection. This law decisively rooted the state-subject relation in the bodies of monarch and subject coextensively. Both of these bodies were deeply implicated in the process of territorialisation that begat the modern state in seventeenth-century England, and in shifting the political bond from local authorities to the sovereign. The chapter then examines the corporeal processes underwriting the centralisation of authority, and shows how the subject’s body also became—via an increasingly important habeas corpus—the centre point of the legal revolution that yielded the natural rights of the modern political subject. Edward Coke plays a central role in the chapter.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Todd Butler
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cognitive Perspective ◽  
Shared Attention ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
To Come

This chapter explains how the political changes of early Stuart England can be usefully examined from a cognitive perspective, with questions of authority and sovereignty being determined not just by what individuals or institutions do but also by how they are understood and expected to think, and in particular how they were expected to come to decisions. In doing so, it links early modern and contemporary understandings of state formation in seventeenth-century England to processes of decision-making and counsel, as well as the management of personal and public opinion, thereby explicating the mental mechanics of early modern governance. More than being simply a form of political thought or doctrine, intellection is presented as a shared attention to cognitive processes amidst historical moments in which we can see particular patterns of thinking—and attention to them as politics—begin to emerge.

Between Chimera and Charybdis: Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Views on the Political Organization of the Italian City-States

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 451-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasileios Syros
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Italian City ◽  
City States

AbstractThis article offers a detailed investigation of Byzantine and post-Byzantine perceptions of the political organization of the Italian city-states. Drawing on philosophical and historical writing produced by Byzantine and post-Byzantine authors between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, it identifies the main patterns and motifs that informed Byzantine discourse about the constitutional arrangements of such Italian cities as Genoa, Venice, Florence, and Milan. It shows how these come into play in the writings of major figures of Byzantine and post-Byzantine intellectual life such as Theodoros Metochites, John Kantakouzenos, Nikephoros Gregoras, George of Trebizond, Cardinal Bessarion, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, and John Kottunios. It also explores the ways in which the classical legacy of political thought was applied by Byzantine writers in their analysis of various constitutional forms. The findings of this survey provide new insights into cross-cultural exchanges between the Byzantine world and medieval and early modern Europe and the formation of Byzantine identity.

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.

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