Shakespeare’s Portrayal of a Tyrant

Moreana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (Number 193- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 40-53
Author(s):  
Peter Milward
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sir Walter Raleigh ◽  
The Ideal

The theme of tyranny, so central (as we have seen in two recent issues of Moreana) to the writings and the experience of Thomas More, is hardly less central to the plays and the memory of William Shakespeare. This centrality appears not so much in the plays of his Elizabethan period as in those of the subsequent Jacobean period, especially in the final romances by way of warming up to his presentation of the historical romance of Henry VIII. There, however, the tyranny of the king, though notably emphasized by Sir Walter Raleigh in his contemporaneous History of the World, is strangely muted, as also is his un-Shakespearian character, but it comes out strongly in the two preceding romances of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, once we read them, as they require us to read them, as “topical allegories”. Then, to the characters of the jealous Leontes and the wrathful Cymbeline, we may add the threatening personality of Antiochus at the beginning of Pericles, as yet another figure (based on a widespread rumour) of the quintessential tyranny of Henry VIII. At the same time, this figure of the victimizer calls to be qualified by the complementary figure of the victim, the heroine in these romances, not only Hermione and Perdita, Thaisa and Marina, and Imogen, but even or especially in Desdemona as victimized by her jealous husband Othello. Then, in the above mentioned “topical allegory” of these Jacobean plays, she stands as well for the ideal of the Virgin Mary as for the memory of Catholic England at the heart of the dramatist.

Shakespeare on the Stage in Restoration Dublin

PMLA ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Bald
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
The Other ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Original Volume ◽  
Timon Of Athens

The Folger Shakespeare Library possesses a number of separate plays, all from the Shakespearian Third Folio, and all bearing unmistakable signs of theatrical annotation. They were acquired by Mr. Folger from a variety of sources: the majority were bought from a bookseller in Munich, one was purchased in London, and another came with the Warwick Castle collection of Shakespeariana. There are nine plays in all: The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, but three of them—The Merry Wives, Macbeth, and Othello—are imperfect. It soon became clear that they were all from the same original volume, which, apparently, had belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps and was dismembered by him. The bindings of the separate plays—half leather, with boards of marbled paper or purplish-brown cloth—are obviously all the work of one binder, and are similar to the bindings of other books which have passed through Halliwell-Phillipps's hands. In addition, his handwriting is to be found in six of them: in The Merry Wives and Macbeth there is an inscription on one of the preliminary flyleaves, and in the other four there is a mere “C. and P.” on a fly-leaf at the end of the book.

scholarly journals The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Emma Rayner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Robert Burton ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Treatises

<p>The Renaissance is often touted as the age of melancholy. For fictional personages like Hamlet as well as for writers like Robert Burton, melancholy served both as a burden and a blessing, facilitating intellectual activity at the expense of psychological and bodily comfort. Precisely because of its Aristotelean associations with brilliance, melancholy was off-limits to early modern women, who were afforded a pathology different not merely in degree but in kind to that of the male melancholic. Female melancholy was understood as an entirely corporeal illness, lacking any semblance of the creative or intellectual fecundity which its male sufferers enjoyed.  Literary critics and cultural historians have long taken the authors of early modern medical treatises at their word, and because of this, the extant scholarship on melancholy projects an overwhelmingly masculinist history of the emotion. Those scholars who have addressed the subterraneous literature of women’s emotion in the Renaissance, moreover, have commonly understood female-voiced articulations of negative affect through the lens of “grief” or “sorrow”. A poetics of female melancholy in the English Renaissance is thus still awaiting formulation, and it is this critical absence that I move to redress.  Putting male-authored, canonical works of literature in dialogue with the poetry of three seventeenth-century women writers, this thesis pursues the topic of a literary melancholy that is specifically female, or female-voiced. Chapter One explores the shape of female melancholic discourse in two Shakespearean texts – Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and in the poetry of devotional poet An Collins. Chapter Two considers the telos of self-marmorisation (the female melancholic’s turn to stone) first in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Comus, and then in the verse of Hester Pulter. Finally, Chapter Three discusses the presence of postlapsarian melancholy in the elegies of Lucy Hutchinson. All three chapters argue for the significance, the matter, of artistic representations of women’s affect in a period which has traditionally seen male expressions of melancholy raised above female expressions of the same.</p>

scholarly journals Avatars de Raphaël Hythlodée, ou l'influence de l'Utopie de Thomas More dans le roman portugais contemporain

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
José Eduardo Reis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Complex Traits ◽  
First Century ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Representative Work ◽  
The Ideal

The history of the literary reception of Thomas More's Utopia in Portugal has been a tale of omissions, censorships and deferred translations that highlight a flaw within the Portuguese cultural system. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that such a representative work of both Western literature and thought, historically associated with the opening of the world's geographical horizons, and which ascribed to a Portuguese sailor, Raphael Hythloday, the discovery of an ideal place, was first translated into Portuguese only in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the first decade of the twenty-first century seems to bode a more auspicious literary fortune for More's Utopia within the Portuguese literary idiom: not only has an edition of More's work finally been translated from the original Latin, but also two novels were published in 2004, A lenda de Martim Regos, by Pedro Canais, and Rafael, by Manuel Alegre. In the context of both books' plots, they rewrite the complex traits of the character of the Portuguese sailor and discoverer of the ideal island. The same reinvention of the character of Raphael had already been attempted, in 1998, by José V. de Pina Martins in his long dialogic Morean narrative, Utopia III. In this essay, I will focus both on the documental sources related to Portuguese culture that are at the root of More's Utopia and on some relevant aspects of the reception of the character of Raphael Hythloday within the aforementioned novels.

Feral and "Wild" Children

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Newton
Keyword(s):  
Common Denominator ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Feral Children ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Political Realm

The term feral children has been taken as applying to those who have endured three very different kinds of childhood experience. In one case, the term covers “children of nature,” that is, those who have lived in a solitary state in the countryside. Closely related to such individuals are those children who have been reared for a while by animals, most notably wolves or bears, though there are also tales of children suckled by gazelle, pigs, sheep, cows, and so on. Yet, the phrase has also been applied to children who have been confined to long periods of isolation within human society, locked up in rooms or dungeons. The common denominator in these tales is the experience of an absolute solitude, the absence of caring human parents, and, very often, the deprivation of language that results from that solitude. As such, for centuries these children have been an object of fascination to philosophers interested in human development, the inception of the political realm, and the origin of language. In more recent times, they have been the subject of study by linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Whether “wild children” have truly existed is a matter of some interest; more important here is what they stand for, the ideas and philosophies they evoke, and the fantasies that their supposed existence nurtures. Outside the English-speaking world, the idea of feral children is especially important in French- and German-language texts. However, this bibliography limits itself to sources in English, including translations of Arabic, Latin, French, and German works. Feral children have been central to a number of literary works, from William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610–1611) to Thomas Day’s The History of Little Jack (1788), and from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1895–1896) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Authors have in several instances turned true stories of feral children into fiction, as with Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser (1908), Catherine Mary Tennant’s Peter the Wild Boy (1939), and Jill Dawson’s novel based on the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Wild Boy (2003). Similarly, several excellent films have been produced on the subject, such as François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1970), Werner Herzog’s Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974), and a number of other successful works, such as Michael Apted’s Nell (1994) or even the Disney-animated classic, The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman 1967). It is beyond the scope of this bibliography to make full mention of these works; however, it is clear that they demonstrate that a fascination with feral children goes beyond the limits of academic discourse.

Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines

2016 ◽  
pp. 610-627
Author(s):  
Jennifer Waldron
Keyword(s):  
Media Theory ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conceptual Shift

Media theorists have recently sought to challenge traditional conceptions of a ‘medium’ as a passive means for human ends, or an exterior supplement to an essential human core; however, they have not yet fully investigated the implications of this conceptual shift for the history of gender. This essay focuses on two key Shakespearean scenes in which female characters become tightly associated with the theatrical medium: the awakening of Queen Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale and the bed-tricks of All’s Well That Ends Well. While these scenes link theatrical devices with qualities conventionally gendered feminine (artificiality, exteriority, and embodiment), they also transvalue the traditionally negative associations of that feminization, in part by reimagining the workings of mediation itself. Shakespeare’s plays thus offer nascent forms of media theory that are deeply relevant to our contemporary world.

A Nest of Traitors!: What is Paranoia?

Paranoia ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Freeman ◽  
Jason Freeman
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Unborn Child ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
James I ◽  
The Tempest

November 5, 1611. London. At the court of James I, the king and his entourage settle down to enjoy the latest play by celebrated playwright William Shakespeare. The play in question is The Winter’s Tale, one of the clutch of so-called romances—along with Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest—Shakespeare wrote before retiring back to Stratford, where he died in April 1616. Like Shakespeare’s other late plays, The Winter’s Tale offers a startling mixture of styles, oscillating wildly between pastoral comedy and intense psychological drama. It also includes a harrowing portrayal of extreme paranoia. Not that this could be guessed from the gentle opening of the play. Leontes, king of Sicily, is entertaining his childhood friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia. But having been away from home for nine months, Polixenes is anxious to return to Bohemia. Leontes pleads with him to stay, but Polixenes’ mind is made up. Or at least it is until Leontes asks his wife, Hermione, to speak to him. And though we might assume that Leontes will be overjoyed by Polixenes’ change of heart, what we see next couldn’t be more unexpected. Polixenes’ decision plunges Leontes into a savage spiral of paranoia. How was Hermione able to persuade his lifelong friend to stay in Sicily when his own efforts were futile? That’s simple: Hermione and Polixenes are lovers. Polixenes is the father of Hermione’s unborn child. And everyone except Leontes knows it: . . . They’re here with me already; whispering, rounding ‘Sicilia is a so-forth’ Tis far gone When I shall gust it last. . . . What starts off resembling a bizarre attack of jealousy soon develops into much more. Suddenly, and without a shred of evidence, Leontes suspects everyone of plotting against him—including his faithful subject Camillo, whose only crime is the attempt to defend Hermione: . . . What starts off resembling a bizarre attack of jealousy soon develops into much more. Suddenly, and without a shred of evidence, Leontes suspects everyone of plotting against him—including his faithful subject Camillo, whose only crime is the attempt to defend Hermione: . . .

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