scholarly journals Black skin matters : the significance of color in early modern England

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Love
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Black People ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
The Impact

This book explores the impact of stereotypical concepts associated with black skin color in representations of black people during the English Renaissance, namely Shakespeare's Othello (Othello), Aaron (Titus Andronicus), Caliban (The Tempest), Rosaline (Love's Labour's Lost), and the "dark lady" (Sonnets). Ultimately, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare, and texts of select English Renaissance authors, retaliate against traditional stereotypical, mythical, or colonial representations of black people -- representations stemming from distinct resentments for black skin color, hegemonic notions of black inferiority, and opportunistic ambitions deriving from collective concepts of white superiority. These very early postcolonial-minded authors foreshadow modern postcolonial philosophers as they factually assess psychological patterns associated with early modern black people who endure racial discrimination, subjugation, and assimilation. Their literature contrasts previous and contemporary colonial works which fail to reference or utilize fact over racial myth when creating representations of black individuals.

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.

Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being in Early Modern England

1983 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Shammas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Total Expenditure ◽  
Important Measure ◽  
Food Expenditures ◽  
Dietary Shifts ◽  
Food And Drink ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Economic Well Being

The proportion of a household's budget spent on diet has commonly served as an important measure of material welfare. This paper pulls together data concerning trends in food expenditures for early modern England and draws comparisons with figures for later periods. The usefulness of wage assessments, a new source for estimating the proportion of outlays devoted to diet, is examined. The impact on food expenditures of new commodities and other dietary shifts is also explored. The findings call into question earlier estimates of the proportion of total expenditure devoted to food and drink in the pre-industrial period and the assumption that food expenditures are always inelastic.

scholarly journals The Impact of the Netherlandish Landscape Tradition on Poetry and Painting in Early Modern England*

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 866-903 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Trevisan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Rare Case ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Complex Product ◽  
Problematic Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe relationship between poetry and painting has been one of the most debated issues in the history of criticism. The present article explores this problematic relationship in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, taking into account theories of rhetoric, visual perception, and art. It analyzes a rare case in which a specific school of painting directly inspired poetry: in particular, the ways in which the Netherlandish landscape tradition influenced natural descriptions in the poem Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622) by Michael Drayton (1563–1631). Drayton — under the influence of the artistic principles of landscape depiction as explained in Henry Peacham’s art manuals, as well as of direct observation of Dutch and Flemish landscape prints and paintings — successfully managed to render pictorial landscapes into poetry. Through practical examples, this essay will thoroughly demonstrate that rhetoric is capable of emulating pictorial styles in a way that presupposes specialized art-historical knowledge, and that pictorialism can be the complex product as much of poetry and rhetoric as of painting and art-theoretical vocabulary.

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