‘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'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.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Retinal Image ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Optical Devices ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Optical Technology ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Subject

This chapter introduces the study by providing an overview of the epistemological, ethical, social, and political issues surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision in early modern England. It lays out the key optical developments of the period, including the invention of the telescope and the microscope, and provides a brief synopsis of Johannes Kepler’s theory of the retinal image, which over the course of the seventeenth century gradually came to replace older, species-based models of vision. This context having been established, the introduction describes the general contours of the debate surrounding the efficacy and ethics of optical technology in the seventeenth century and identifies and introduces the major works to be discussed in subsequent chapters. It closes with an explanation of the study’s methodological approach, which is to read the texts it includes not only as being about optical devices but also as acting as optical devices—literary lenses that can be used to reveal the hidden motivations, assumptions, and desires present within their words.

Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama, 1385–1600. By Benjamin Griffin. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2001; pp. xiii + 193. $70 cloth.

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-309
Author(s):  
Paulette Marty
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
History Plays ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dramatic Structure ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
History Play

Benjamin Griffin takes an innovative approach to studying the history-play genre in early modern England. Rather than comparing history plays to their chronicle sources or interrogating their political implications, Griffin studies their relationships with other early modern English dramas, contextualizing them for “those who wish . . . to understand the history play by way of the history of plays” (xiii). He seeks to identify the genre's distinct characteristics by selecting a relatively broad spectrum of plays and examining their dramatic structure, their historical content, and their audiences' relationship to the subject matter.

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.

Being, Belief, Comprehension and Confusion: An Exploration of the Assemblages of English Post-Reformation Parochial Religion

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jude Jones
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The People ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
The Many ◽  
Selection Of

The religious temperature of post-Reformation early modern England was constantly over-heating. Given that Protestant belief was frequently challenged by residual dissent, religious identity of whatever kind was crucial to both individual and parochial cosmological understanding. Hence, the many spatial, sensory, material and performative changes which were visited on parish churches over this period were designed to shape and redirect belief, but could also act to confuse believers. In order to penetrate this mass of religious reaction and response, I employ Assemblage Theory, particularly that of the political theorist, Jane Bennett, whose thinking is currently strongly influential amongst archaeologists. Using her work on the vitality of matter and the importance of the assemblage as a phenomenon containing material, non-material and human components, I apply a selection of her ideas to diagnostic elements of being and belief visible in the religious activities and materiality of the early modern parish church. While I refrain from discussing particular human individuals or groups, my chosen examples are intended to foreground the ontology of early modern parishioners, their perception of their hierarchical status within Anglican cosmology, their territorial conceptions of religious space and the workings of time as seen through the sequential assemblages of monumental tombs. Following Bennett, but departing from the current archaeological concentration on the primacy of materiality, this essay is designed to plug some of the people-shaped holes which are sometimes left unfilled by their surrounding material networks.

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.

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