scholarly journals The Ghost Tradition: Helen Of Troy In The Elizabethan Era

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
ADRIANA RADUCANU
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Helen Of Troy

Abstract Reputedly the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, Helen of Troy (or Sparta) is less well known for her elusive, ghost-like dimension. Homer wrote that the greatest war of Western classical antiquity started because of Helen's adultery followed by her elopement to Troy. Other ancient writers and historians, among theme Aeschylus, Stesichorus, Hesiod, Pausanias, Aristophanes, Euripides and Gorgias of Leontini, challenged the Homeric version, in various ways and attempted to exonerate Helen either by focusing on her phantom/ ghost/ as the generic object of man's desire and scorn or by casting doubt on the mechanisms of the blaming process. This paper argues that the Elizabethans Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare adopted and adapted the anti-Homer version of the depiction of Helen, what I here call “the ancient Helen ghost tradition”; nevertheless, in so doing they further reinforced the character's demonic features and paradoxically achieved a return to the adulterous Homeric Helen.

ON LITERATURE AND GRAMMAR: A Selection of Annotated Medieval and Renaissance English Texts for (Spanish) University Students

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gema Chocano Díaz ◽  
Noelia Hernando Real
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
University Students ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Sir Thomas Wyatt ◽  
Selection Of

On Literature and Grammar gives students and instructors a carefully thought experience to combine their learning of Middle and Early Modern English and Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. The selection of texts, which include the most commonly taught works in university curricula, allows readers to understand and enjoy the evolution of the English language and the main writers and works of these periods, from William Langland to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and from Christopher Marlowe to William Shakespeare. Fully annotated and written to answer the real needs of current Spanish university students, these teachable texts include word-by-word translations into Present Day English and precise introductions to their linguistic and literary contexts.

Last Acts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Art Of Dying

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

THEOLOGY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE: FROM CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE TO ALEXANDER POPE

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-87
Author(s):  
Suruchi Kumari ◽  
Ashish Alexander
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
John Milton ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Biblical Theology ◽  
Alexander Pope ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Freedom Of Choice ◽  
High Degree

Generally, it is not obvious to people that theology has contributed a lot in the formation of English literature. So, this paper tries to picture and convince how the writings of English Literature writers have impacts and influences in themselves from the biblical theology. Writers like William Shakespeare uses the theology of grace in his play All’s Well that’s End Well. John Milton pens theology of Freedom of Choice. John Donne writes Trinitarian Theology. Christopher Marlowe shows the theology of Doctor Faustus, which shines under the title like purgatory the highest junction. Alexander Pope reflects the theology of participation in self Salvation and shows theodicy in his work. Theology and English literature go together. They are inseparable. Theology is interwoven in English Literature. It appears convincingly that William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, and Alexander Pope have sufficiently left grains in their writings which compel to justify the significance of theology in English Literature. Thus, a high degree of significance the biblical theology immerges within the arena of English Literature which may be taught to the English literature readers with a well stuff of biblical theology which is very much beneficial for the understanding of English literature knower.

scholarly journals Can in Shakespeare and Marlowe

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-55
Author(s):  
Monika Skorasińska
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Modal Verb

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to present the main meanings and the use of the modal verb can in the plays of two Early Modern English playwrights, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. In particular, the study aims at presenting a comparative analysis and provides descriptive as well as quantitative data. The research is based on the analysis of the corpus consisting of the plays written by Shakespeare and Marlowe between 1593-1599. The choice of the works is not random but includes the plays which bear the strongest resemblance in terms of theme, structure, and most importantly, the language of both authors.

scholarly journals Helenê kinêmatographikê; or, Is this the face that launched a thousand films?

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-257
Author(s):  
Martin M. Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Trojan War ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Helen Of Troy ◽  
The Face

In ancient Greece and Rome, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman among mortals. Her beauty, an almost divine quality, made Helen immortal. Its praise was an integral part of Greek and Roman letters. The cinema has eagerly followed in the footsteps of classical and later authors and artists by retelling her story. Beautiful actresses have variously portrayed her as unhappy wife of Menelaus, romantic lover of Paris, and ruinous cause of the Trojan War. This paper pays homage to Helen’s beauty by presenting, in word and image, her most notable screen incarnations from 1911 to 2013.

Rhetoric and Theater

2015 ◽  
pp. 448-460
Author(s):  
Russ McDonald
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Early History ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Thomas Kyd ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
The Impact

This chapter demonstrates the impact of rhetorical training in shaping the Elizabethan theater at the end of the sixteenth century. English schoolmasters had translated the Latin rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian into the vernacular, and these verbal forms—schemes, tropes, and figures—became a central feature of Tudor pedagogy; two classroom exercises in rhetoric were prosopopoeia (the impersonation of a character) and argumentum in utramque partem (defending both sides of a debating question). Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe first exploited these rhetorical and poetic forms theatrically in the 1580s, and shortly thereafter William Shakespeare built on their model in the abundant poetic artifice of his early history cycle, a feature especially apparent in Henry VI, Part Three. Crucially, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the possibilities of rhetoric as a persuasive art served to complicate the drama and thus to immerse the audience in the process of interpretation.

Stealing Helen

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Edmunds
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Old Irish ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
Trojan War ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Helen Of Troy ◽  
Eye Opening ◽  
The Many ◽  
Many Sources

It's a familiar story: a beautiful woman is abducted and her husband journeys to recover her. This story's best-known incarnation is also a central Greek myth—the abduction of Helen that led to the Trojan War. Stealing Helen surveys a vast range of folktales and texts exhibiting the story pattern of the abducted beautiful wife and makes a detailed comparison with the Helen of Troy myth. This book shows that certain Sanskrit, Welsh, and Old Irish texts suggest there was an Indo-European story of the abducted wife before the Helen myth of the Iliad became known. Investigating Helen's status in ancient Greek sources, the book argues that if Helen was just one trope of the abducted wife, the quest for Helen's origin in Spartan cult can be abandoned, as can the quest for an Indo-European goddess who grew into the Helen myth. The book explains that Helen was not a divine essence but a narrative figure that could replicate itself as needed, at various times or places in ancient Greece. It recovers some of these narrative Helens, such as those of the Pythagoreans and of Simon Magus, which then inspired the Helens of the Faust legend and Goethe. This book offers a detailed critique of prevailing views behind the “real” Helen and presents an eye-opening exploration of the many sources for this international mythical and literary icon.

Foreign

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne L. Wofford
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Thomas Dekker ◽  
John Marston ◽  
Foreign Material ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
English Drama ◽  
English Stage ◽  
European Theatre

This chapter focuses on the importation into English drama of elements that had their roots in European theatre as well as in classical sources and in English imaginations of the ancient past. It shows how this foreign material was absorbed by the plays of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston, becoming fully international even when they appeared to be most local. It also considers several methodological categories for thinking in new ways about the problem of cultural translation that had come to define English theatre by 1600, including the need to recognize what it calls the ‘formal agency’ of the theatre’s many different parts—the tropes, genres, emotions, characters, geographies, and ideas that imported a richly overdetermined set of foreign cultural meanings onto the English stage. Three troping actions that describe the transformations brought about by the foreign on stage are discussed: the foreign as intertext, or trope intertextual; the foreign as intertheatrical, or intertheatrical trope; and translation, or trope intercultural.

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