scholarly journals ‘How can you say to me I am a King?’: New Historicism and its (Re)interpretations of the Design of Kingly Figures in Shakespeare’s History Plays

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (38) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
James Dale
Keyword(s):  
New Historicism ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Second Tetralogy ◽  
The Way

The 1980’s saw the emergence of New Historicist criticism, particularly through Stephen Greenblatt’s work. Its legacy remains influential, particularly on Shakespearean Studies. I wish to outline New Historicist methodological insights, comment on some of its criticisms and provide analytical comments on the changing approach to historical plays, asking “What has New Historicism brought into our understanding of historical plays and the way(s) of designing kingly power?” Examining Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, I will review Greenblatt’s contention that these plays largely focus on kingly power and its relationship to “subversion” and “containment”. I intend to focus on aspects of the plays that I believe have not received enough attention through New Historicism; particularly the design of the kingly figures.

scholarly journals Beyond the Epic. Richard II and the Nature of the Tragic in Shakespeare

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 120-141
Author(s):  
Igor O. Shaytanov
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Metaphysical Tradition ◽  
Second Tetralogy ◽  
Dramatic Technique ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

The major disagreement on the nature of the epic is rooted in the opposition of two concepts — either the epic draws on the myth, or its optics is regulated by history. In Leonid Pinsky’s opinion the way leading from the epic past towards the individual and inward self was the way of Shakespeare’s heroes both in his tragedies and history plays. Richard II (1595, opening the second tetralogy) follows one of the two archetypes suggested by Hugh Grady in his article “Shakespeare's links to Machiavelli and Montaigne.” Richard is not essentially a machiavellian type, though occasionally called a weak, “deficient” tyrant by critics and a “landlord” (not a king) by John Gaunt in the play. Creating this character Shakespeare makes the first step towards Hamlet. The climax is reached in the scene of his dethronement, much more known for its political topicality than being scrutinized for the discovery a dethroned king is to make. Who is he now? A nonentity, or a new being? The mirror he asks to bring lies, he thinks, when he recognizes his own unchanged face in it. Several scenes in the play (the Queen and Bushy, Richard and his jailor) demonstrate how the lyrical experience, Shakespeare must have acquired in the two plague years (1592–1594), had changed his dramatic technique. In Richard II he gave a start to a new metaphysical tradition.

Sovereign Outlaws: Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-79
Author(s):  
Conor McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Sovereign Immunity ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
The Law ◽  
Second Tetralogy

This chapter asks whether the sovereign can (and perhaps must) act outside the law in a reading of the second tetralogy of Shakespeare’s history plays. The discussion opens with an examination of the notion of sovereign immunity, contrasted with a competing line of discourse against tyranny. It then argues that questions around the king’s status relative to the law constitute an important set of issues within Shakespeare’s Richard II,where both individuals (Richard and Bolingbroke) and events (Richard’s deposition) may be read as existing outside of the law in various senses. The chapter proceeds to consider the remaining plays in the tetralogy, arguing that Henry V, a sort of quasi-outlaw before gaining the throne, finds as king that he must act outside the law to defend the interests of his state. The discussion surveys a range of legal questions in Henry V, from his claim to the throne of France to his threats before Harfleur and his killing of prisoners at Agincourt. The chapter concludes with a brief glance at espionage in Elizabethan England, and the Elizabethan state’s recourse to methods of invisible power.

scholarly journals The Problem of Kingship in Shakespeare’S History Plays

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-85
Author(s):  
Tatjana Dumitrašković
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
The Way

Abstract Elizabethan England was a state of repression and Shakespeare could not write his plays freely and he could not oppose Elizabeth and her government openly. So he had to use allegory and every one of his plays is an act of rebellion. This paper deals with Shakespeare’s history plays which are symbols of resistance to the rule of force and war politics, and that message is implicit in the way of presenting kings.

The Voice of the Silenced in Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners: Three English Lives, and Colum McCann’s

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Rosli Talif ◽  
Manimangai Mani ◽  
Ida Baizura Bahar ◽  
Intisar Mohammed Wagaa
Keyword(s):  
Current Paper ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Way

This article examines the implications of history in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007), and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (2013). History plays an important role in discriminating and distinguishing the proper characteristics of certain nations and people of a specific historical era. The purpose of the current paper is to scrutinize the historical components in the selected novels. These novels incarnate the authors’ visions of the silenced minorities depicted in the fictional plots. They embody the sense of individual sufferings at the time of human devastation and retardation caused by historical events. In essence, my study focuses on the authors’ abstract voices which are uttered through the fictional characters’ dialogic voices. That is, the authors portray the neglected and suppressed voices which need alleviation and freedom. Thus, the authors do not tend to express their authorial voices directly in the novels. Instead, they convey their literary meanings through the characters’ voices. Thus, my analysis will focus on both the authors’ implied voices and their manifestation in the characters’ direct fictional voices. The methodological analysis of the study will concentrate on the way by which the authors present the peculiarities of their fictional characters and discourses. 

What Matters Who Hears? Edmund Wilson and the Pragmatics of Literary Critical Discourse

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-221
Author(s):  
Joshua Kates
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Ideology Critique ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Or History ◽  
The Way ◽  
What Matters

Attention to literature, it is commonly believed, is attention to how what is said is said, along with what is said. Whether understood as New Critical irony, deconstructive textuality, the referential density of literary discourse in the new historicism, or the overdetermined signifier of cultural studies and ideology critique, the foregrounding of the way in which discourse comes to expression - to the point of breaking the confines of the volume and surmounting the identity of the author - distinguishes literature as an object, and literary studies as a discipline, from all others, such as philosophy or history.

Historiography

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Lander
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
History Writing ◽  
English History ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Revisionist History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The Way

During the Reformation, arguments over the near and distant past are crucial for making people increasingly aware of the plurality of competing, even contradictory, accounts of the past. This article examines the way in which historical accounts of Richard III’s reign point to the emergence of a historiographical consciousness, an awareness that written history is partial in both senses of the word. It considers the extent of John Foxe’s influence on English history writing and how he made revisionist history mainstream. It analyses chronicle history plays, especiallyThe True Tragedie of Richard III, as evidence that historiographical consciousness was widespread in the period. It also treats the connection between dissimulation and conspiracy in Thomas More’sHistoryand cites George Buck’sThe History of King Richard III(1619) as a remarkable example of revisionism that deploys historical learning against received opinion.

scholarly journals The Hollow Crown:Shakespeare, the BBC, and the 2012 London Olympics

Linguaculture ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Morse
Keyword(s):  
Coalition Government ◽  
History Plays ◽  
English History ◽  
Production Team ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
Second Tetralogy ◽  
London Olympics

Abstract During the summer of 2012, and to coincide with the Olympics, BBC2 broadcast a series called The Hollow Crown, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of English history plays. The BBC commission was conceived as part of the Cultural Olympiad which accompanied Britain’s successful hosting of the Games that summer. I discuss the financial, technical, aesthetic, and political choices made by the production team, not only in the context of the Coalition government (and its attacks on the BBC) but also in the light of theatrical and film tradition. I argue that the inclusion or exclusion of two key scenes suggest something more complex and balanced that the usual nationalism of the plays'; rather, the four nations are contextualised to comprehend and acknowledge the regions - apropos not only in the Olympic year, but in 2014's referendum on the Union of the crowns of England/Wales and Scotland.

Michael Bogdanov’s Iconoclastic Approach to Political Shakespeare

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (02) ◽  
pp. 99-111
Author(s):  
Darren Freebury-Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Wars Of The Roses ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

Between 1986 and 1989, Michael Bogdanov directed The Wars of the Roses (an ambitious seven-play Shakespeare cycle that won him the Olivier Award for Best Director in 1990), introducing an accessible and pertinent Shakespeare to 1980s audiences and paving the way for later politicized versions of Shakespeare’s plays – such as, recently, the New York Public Theater’s 2017 production of Julius Caesar. Following Bogdanov’s death in 2017, the time seems right for a new appraisal of his work as a radical, political director. The collection of Bogdanov’s personal papers at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust offers a unique opportunity to gain an insight into the director’s mind. The papers include annotated scripts, production records, prompt books, reviews, programmes, unpublished manuscripts, and two volumes of The Director’s Cut – documents spanning Bogdanov’s entire theatrical career. In this article Darren Freebury-Jones engages with these materials, as well as the influences of theoretical movements such as cultural materialism on the director’s approach, in order to shed light on the ways in which Bogdanov stimulated and inspired new readings of Shakespeare’s history plays.

Self-sacrifice for in-group's history: A diachronic perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Babińska ◽  
Michal Bilewicz
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Psychology ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Emotional Events ◽  
Reciprocal Process ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe problem of extended fusion and identification can be approached from a diachronic perspective. Based on our own research, as well as findings from the fields of social, political, and clinical psychology, we argue that the way contemporary emotional events shape local fusion is similar to the way in which historical experiences shape extended fusion. We propose a reciprocal process in which historical events shape contemporary identities, whereas contemporary identities shape interpretations of past traumas.

What is the purpose of cognition?

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aba Szollosi ◽  
Ben R. Newell
Keyword(s):  
Infinite Number ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
The Way

Abstract The purpose of human cognition depends on the problem people try to solve. Defining the purpose is difficult, because people seem capable of representing problems in an infinite number of ways. The way in which the function of cognition develops needs to be central to our theories.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document