scholarly journals Shakespeare’s Pauses, Authorship, and Early Chronology

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Bruster
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Computational Approaches ◽  
Jacobean Drama ◽  
Edward Iii ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Arden Of Faversham

This paper explores the implications of Ants Oras’s Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: An Experiment in Prosody (Oras 1960) for the chronology and authorship of plays in early modern England. Oras’s brief monograph has been noticed by a relatively few scholars, mainly those interested in changes to Shakespeare’s pentameter line. Recent developments in the field, however, have rendered his data newly attractive. Compiled by hand, Oras’s figures on the punctuated pauses in pentameter verse offer computational approaches a wealth of information by which writers’ stylistic profiles and changes can be measured. Oras’s data for a large number of playwrights and poets, as well as his methodology generally, may prove instrumental in constructing a portrait of the aesthetic environment for writers of pentameter verse during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. In particular, pause percentages may lend context to our attributions of texts of uncertain authorship. A hypothetical chronology is offered for Shakespeare’s earliest writing, including his contributions to Arden of Faversham, 1 Henry VI, and Edward III.

‘She’s Turned Fury’: Women Transmogrified in Revenge Plays

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-236
Author(s):  
Janet Clare
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Revenge Plays

This chapter explores early modern responses to Hecuba, arguing that whereas Euripides’ Hecuba is a sympathetic tragic heroine and successful avenger, this model was not replicated in early modern plays. Instead the two aspects of Hecuba’s role, that of lamenting mother and ruthless avenger, bifurcate in English revenge tragedy. Pitiful, mourning mothers such as Isabella from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are unsuccessful, while savage ones, such as Tamora from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, are abhorrent and aberrant, inflicting violence from a position of power. In contrast to Germany and France – where artistic treatments of the Biblical Judith decapitating General Holofernes offer a heroic, political image of female vengeance – the chapter argues that in early modern England revenge was definitively not a woman’s business.

scholarly journals Destabilising Decapitation in 'King Henry VI'

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Hannah Simpson ◽  
Hannah Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
State Authority ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
The Individual

In early modern England, state beheadings were carefully codified, reserved for the nobility and those convicted of treason. The highest and lowest in society were sentenced to beheading: those who headed the nation and those who threatened the head of the nation. Beheading was both a confirmation and an inscription of power: the publicly-staged state-mandated beheading inscribed the state’s power on the subject’s body, reducing the individual to a legible, mastered sign. The decapitated head was intended to be a stable, monosemantic inscription of state power.Shakespeare, however, often resisted the idea of the decapitated head as a permanent, definitive inscription of state authority. This article will examine decapitations in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3 (1591), exploring how these plays undermine the state’s attempt to inscribe a stable, single meaning on the decapitated head. The plays do this in two ways: firstly, by challenging the state’s monopoly on according hierarchised punishment, by staging illicit beheadings; secondly, by according an agency and an influence to the decapitated head itself on the stage. The recognition of how these staged beheadings undermine the state’s inscription of power might guide us towards seeing the genre’s recurrently subversive response to the state’s claim to authority.

An Ocean Untouched and Untried

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John-Mark Philo
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Ab Urbe Condita ◽  
The Status ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This is a study of the translation and reception of the Roman historian Livy in early-modern England. The work examines the four Tudor translations of Livy’s history of Rome, the Ab Urbe Condita, into the English vernacular during the sixteenth century and their engagements with the most pressing political and cultural debates of the day, from Henrician appropriations of Hannibal to arguments over the status of women. The first chapter examines Livy’s initial reception into print in Europe, outlining the attempts of his earliest editors to impose a critical order onto his enormous work. The subsequent chapters consider the respective translations undertaken by Anthony Cope, William Thomas, William Painter, and Philemon Holland, situating them among the wider trends in Classical Reception during the early-modern era. Each translation is compared in detail with the Latin original, highlighting the changes Livy’s history experienced in the process of translation. The study considers how these translations responded to and were shaped by the most recent developments in European scholarship on Livy’s history and classical historiography more generally. So too the study examines Livy’s impact on more popular forms of English literature during the Renaissance, especially the works of Shakespeare. Ultimately this research demonstrates that Livy played a fundamental though underexplored role in the development of vernacular literature, historiography, and political thought in early-modern England.

scholarly journals Ants Oras and the Analysis of Early Modern English Dramatic Verse

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-57
Author(s):  
MacDonald P. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
John Fletcher ◽  
Huge Amount ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Jacobean Drama ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
First Folio ◽  
Dramatic Verse ◽  
Arden Of Faversham

Ants Oras’s contribution to the study of early modern English dramatic verse is of enduring value. In 1956 his article on extra monosyllables in Henry VIII gave much needed support to the view that both this play of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (first published in a quarto of 1634) were works in which Shakespeare had collaborated with John Fletcher. Oras’s Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (1960), with its huge amount of quantitative data and readily intelligible graphs, greatly enhanced understanding of how blank verse developed from the 1580s to the closing of the London theatres in 1642. Moreover, use of Oras’s techniques of analysis has continued to throw light on questions of chronology and authorship surrounding Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights. Among plays illuminated in this way have been The Revenger’s Tragedy, Pericles, Thomas of Woodstock, Sir Thomas More, and Arden of Faversham.

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