Shadowing Shakespeare

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-84
Author(s):  
Alex Watson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Nation State ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
English History ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Modern Nation State

In his 1980 film Kagemusha or Shadow Warrior, Akira Kurosawa presents the sixteenth-century Takeda clan engaging a lower-class thief to impersonate their recently deceased leader, Takeda Shingen. I examine Kagemusha as a critical engagement with Shakespeare’s English history plays and ‘shadow’ counterpart to Kurosawa’s trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations, Throne of Blood (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and Ran (1985). In keeping with Shakespeare’s dramatisation of English history, Kurosawa creatively reworks historical sources, incorporating stories of intergenerational rivalry and fulfilled prophecies, to depict the transition from medieval civil conflict to the early-modern nation-state. Kurosawa also deploys the motif of the double to explore the distinctively Shakespearean theme of power as performance, engaging in a dramatic examination of Machiavelli’s ideas about politics. I argue that Kurosawa’s use of the double posits a theory of influence, drawing on Japanese cultural traditions, in which doubling can achieve a form of transcendence through self-annihilation.

Place, People, Texts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Nation State

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Lecky
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
British Society ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Public Markets ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
Modern Nation State

The Introduction argues that in early modern Britain maps of sovereign power jostled against geographies of mundane resistance in ways that could marginalize bastions of social control. This spatial incongruity sprang from the practice of everyday life, through which consumers appropriated informational media in opportunistic ways. This chapter sets the scene for the rest of the book by showing that laureate poetry by writers such as Jonson and Spenser circulated alongside pocket maps and other forms of cheap print in public markets. Together, these texts inspired new paradigms of collectivity for a British society on the cusp of transitioning into a modern nation-state.

The Syro-Anatolian City-States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
City States ◽  
Cultural Mobility ◽  
Lines Of Evidence ◽  
Northeast Corner ◽  
Modern Nation State

This book presents a new model for the kingdoms that clustered around the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea during the Iron Age, ca. 1200–600 BCE. Rather than presenting them as an ancient version of the modern nation-state, characterized by homogenous ethnolinguistic communities like “the Aramaeans” or “the Luwians” living in neatly bounded territories, this book presents these polities as being fundamentally diverse and variable, distinguished by demographic fluidity and cultural mobility. This conclusion is reached via an examination of a host of evidentiary sources, including site plans, settlement patterns, visual arts, and historical sources. Together, these lines of evidence lead to the awareness that this time and place consisted of a complex fusion of cultural traditions that is nevertheless distinctly recognizable unto itself. This book thus proposes a new term to encapsulate that diversity: the Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex.

Two urban districts in early modern Istanbul: Edirnekapı and Yedikule

Urban History ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-43
Author(s):  
SELMA AKYAZICI ÖZKOÇAK
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Technological Factors ◽  
Urban Districts

This paper explores how the system of meat supply influenced the topographical development of two marginal districts of sixteenth-century Istanbul. Through the combination of information contained in various historical sources, the paper reconstructs the economic links between some of their ‘dependent’ establishments such as slaughterhouses, tanning workshops, candle- and soapmakers. Throughout, it is argued that decisions about the location of these establishments were closely related to social, economic and probably technological factors of the era.

THE FORMATION OF A JAPANOCENTRIC WORLD ORDER

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arano Yasunori
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
World Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Nation State

Two major phenomena helped define Japan's foreign relations in the early modern period: the ban on international maritime travel and trading, and the Japanese adaptation of a Sinocentric rhetoric governing foreign relations with tributary states. In this article I will describe and analyze how these phenomena emerged and evolved, with special emphasis on the role they played in shaping Japan as an early modern nation state and forming for it a sense of “national identity.” My examination will focus on them especially in the context of Japan's relationship with its East Asian neighbours, and I place particular emphasis on four points.

scholarly journals THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF MIRZA NAINI

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (03) ◽  
pp. 263-270
Author(s):  
Syed Zeeshan Haider Zaidi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Common People ◽  
Modern Nation State

In Islam this is Gods right to rule over man and he gave this right according to Sunni Islam to everyone who possesses some abilities mentioned in books written by jurists but Shia Muslims believe that not only God is legitimate authority, He also appointed specific persons for political leadership after prophet Mohammad (peace upon him), they are twelve Imam the last Imam Mahdi(peace upon him) went to major occultation in 941 and till sixteenth century Shia Muslims could not establish government like Safivids dynasty in Iran.The rise of the modern nation-state in the Middle East in the early 20 century led to debates around the role of the clergy in the state and the nature of an Islamic state There was a controversial debate about constitution, is it legitimated according to Islam or not? In the responseTanbih al ummah va Tanzih al Millahwas written by Mirza Naini. He supported the idea of making constitution and legitimacy of assembly where representatives of people can do legislation because these two can control kings selfishness and make him away from tyranny. He also accepted concept of nation-state and proved that these concepts are not bidah.(condemnable innovation in religion)He believed in equality of common people with rulers along with their right of freedom.

scholarly journals Body and Communication: The ‘Ordinary’ Art of Tang Da Wu

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. W.-L. WEE
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Modern Nation State

What might the contemporary performing body look like when it seeks to communicate and to cultivate the need to live well within the natural environment, whether the context of that living well is framed and set upon either by long-standing cultural traditions or by diverse modernizing forces over time? The Singapore performance and visual artist Tang Da Wu has engaged with a present and a region fractured by the predations of unacceptable cultural norms – the consequences of colonial modernity or the modern nation state taking on imperial pretensions – and the subsumption of Singapore society under capitalist modernization. Tang's performing body both refuses the diminution of time to the present, as is the wont of the forces he engages with, and undertakes interventions by sometimes elusive and ironic means – unlike some overdetermined contemporary performance art – that reject the image of the modernist ‘artist as hero’. Part of the cause for this distinctive art committed to historicity and a deliberate ordinariness is that artistic communication to him means provoking self-reflexive thought rather than immediate action. Over the years this has resulted in collaborative artistic workshops, in which he has imaginatively transferred art making from his body to the realm of ordinary people. These workshops become his particular extension of the neo-avant-garde's breaching of art's infrastructures.

The First English History of the Russian Time of Troubles: Samuel Purchas’s “Late Changes” (1625)

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Maureen Perrie
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
English History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Time Of Troubles ◽  
Boris Godunov ◽  
Source Materials

Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, first published in 1625, is a collection of travel accounts similar to that edited by Richard Hakluyt in the late sixteenth century, but it also includes the earliest secondary history of the Time of Troubles in English. Purchas’s chapter entitled “The late changes and manifold alterations in Russia since Ivan Vasilowich to this present …” combines documentary publication with narrative history. This article examines the source materials used by Purchas and discusses his own commentary on events. Purchas considers that historians should demonstrate the justice of God’s providence in punishing a people’s sins, and he assesses the reigns of Ivan IV and Boris Godunov in this light. He enlivens his narrative with elaborate metaphors, including that of Russia during the interregnum of 1610–1612 as a “many-headed monster”. This metaphor was commonly used by conservative writers in early modern England to designate the ordinary people, but Purchas uses it more creatively in relation to Russia, to signify not only the multitude but also the rival candidates for the throne, including pretenders (samozvantsy).

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-146
Author(s):  
Yarí Pérez Marín
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Medical Books

This section briefly discusses the place of sixteenth century print medical texts written by authors who resided in colonial Mexico within the larger context of the study of Latin American letters. It stresses the need to maintain a distinction between presence and influence when assessing the significance of their texts within larger cultural traditions, both in the context of colonial writing and as outputs conditioned by the logic of scientific progress moving into the seventeenth century, which saw some of the most widely disseminated sources of the previous era slip into obscurity as new medical findings superseded earlier formulations. The conclusion remarks on the important role played by this group of radicado figures who authored the print medical books of early modern Mexico, considering how they articulated intellectual positions that both anticipated and differed from later criollo responses to colonial mechanisms for marginalisation and exclusion.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document