scholarly journals Shakespeare and the Demonization of Fairies

Text Matters ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 194-213
Author(s):  
Piotr Spyra
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Many ◽  
Historical Reflection

The article investigates the canonical plays of William Shakespeare - Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest - in an attempt to determine the nature of Shakespeare’s position on the early modern tendency to demonize fairy belief and to view fairies as merely a form of demonic manifestation. Fairy belief left its mark on all four plays, to a greater or lesser extent, and intertwined with the religious concerns of the period, it provides an important perspective on the problem of religion in Shakespeare’s works. The article will attempt to establish whether Shakespeare subscribed to the tendency of viewing fairies as demonic agents, as epitomized by the Daemonologie of King James, or opposed it. Special emphasis will also be put on the conflation of fairies and Catholicism that one finds best exemplified in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The article draws on a wealth of recent scholarship on early modern fairies, bringing together historical reflection on the changing perception of the fairy figure, research into Shakespeare’s attitude towards Catholicism and analyses of the many facets of anti-Catholic polemic emerging from early modern Protestant discourse.

‘Ministers of Fate’: Politic Oversight and Ideal Authorities

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Angus
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Levels Of Reality ◽  
The Fantastic

This chapter describes the ambivalent use of informer-figures found in the metadrama of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and argues that the magical setting of these plays may facilitate a more revealing picture of authorities’ reliance on these than Jonsonian realism, or tragic form, might allow. Exceptionally, a discourse of ‘illusion and reality’ is useful in interpreting the metadrama of these plays, since in both cases it is authority which is displaced into the licentious landscapes of magic and fantasy. MND argues for an ideal of dramatic authorial power in a world where a relatively beneficent authority, free of hierarchical dysfunction, oversees agents acting in playful mischief rather than insidious paid malignity. The Tempest’s dramatic and magical setting, meanwhile, demonstrates a greater concern to control representation. In this case the interplay of metadramatic levels of ‘reality’ mirrors early modern conditions of production for the teller of tales, in which authority requires both authorship skills and those of unseen observation. The fact that the dominant imagery of authority and informing persists in these texts despite the fantastic content may suggest an inherently political aspect to metadramatic form itself.

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.

‘More, I prithee, more’: Melancholy, Musical Appetite and Medical Discourse in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Iselin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

Pierre Iselin broaches the subject of early modern music and aims at contextualising Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most musical comedies, within the polyphony of discourses—medical, political, poetic, religious and otherwise—on appetite, music and melancholy, which circulated in early modern England. Iselin examines how these discourses interact with what the play says on music in the many commentaries contained in the dramatic text, and what music itself says in terms of the play’s poetics. Its abundant music is considered not only as ‘incidental,’ but as a sort of meta-commentary on the drama and the limits of comedy. Pinned against contemporary contexts, Twelfth Night is therefore regarded as experimenting with an aural perspective and as a play in which the genre and mode of the song, the identity and status of the addressee, and the more or less ironical distance that separates them, constantly interfere. Eventually, the author sees in this dark comedy framed by an initial and a final musical event a dramatic piece punctuated, orchestrated and eroticized by music, whose complex effects work both on the onstage and the offstage audiences. This reflection on listening and reception seems to herald an acoustic aesthetics close to that of The Tempest.

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 Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice in Britain, 1300–1700: An Introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-683
Author(s):  
Alexandra Shepard ◽  
Tim Stretton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Marital Property ◽  
The Many ◽  
Women's Appearance ◽  
Women And The Law

AbstractThis introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional boundaries that shaped litigation strategies, the constraints surrounding women's appearance as witnesses in court, the gendered differentiation of rights determined by primogeniture and marital property law, and the boundaries between legal and extralegal activity. Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced approach, it rejects the construction of women's litigation simply as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms and also urges caution against overestimating or oversimplifying the choices available to women in legal disputes or their latitude to operate as autonomous individuals. Gender intersected in British courts with locality, resources, jurisdiction, social status, and familial, religious, and political affiliations to inform different women's access to justice, which involved negotiations between unequal actors within various constraints and in complex alignment with multiple and often competing interests.

Journey through light and darkness: a study of duplication in Shakespeare

1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Aimara Da Cunha Resende
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Status ◽  
Ideological Stance ◽  
Renaissance Poetics

As Shakespeare matures, his ideological stance changes from that of a writer believing in and backing up the establishment, to that of one who, though deeply aware of man in his human condition, doubts the validity of the status quo. His art then reflects the changes in his stance. At first it tends to present Renaissance poetics, becoming essentially Baroque, in its greatest phase, to move back to more firmly delineated forms and structures, in his last plays. This study of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet and The Tempest aims at presenting some characteristics both of the Renaissance elements in the structure, based on "mise en abyme," and of the Baroque poetics found within this structure. These aspects are viewed against the background of the ideology of Shakespeare's England at the same time that duplication, in Lacan's sense, is analysed and shows to coincide with the support and/or acceptance of the social cannons.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document