scholarly journals Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia in Doctor Faustus, Macbeth and The Tempest

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Márta Hargitai
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Doctor Faustus

In the paper nostalgia and their types will first be explained and revisited; then, three examples will be provided for early modern dramatic representations of the then-unnamed concept of the pain of missing one’s homeland and the yearning to return safely to where one belongs. The frustration felt by various characters for to the means of escape and return safely home, to be finally saved and recover/retrieve/reclaim their possessions, rights, original place, title, etc. (cf. the etymology of nostalgia from Greek nostos “homecoming,” ultimately from PIE nes- “escape from, survive, be saved” + Greek algos “pain”) can be seen to play a key role in each of the three plays under investigation. The plays investigated here are Doctor Faustus, Macbeth, and The Tempest, and the paper demonstrates that despite their generic and thematic differences all three represent the synthesis of two types of nostalgia—reflective and restorative—giving voice to both elements reflected in the etymology of the word: nostos and algos; thereby informing us of the striking abundance of nostalgic tendencies in the literature of the period.

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.

THE TEMPEST AND THE BRITISH IMPERIUM IN 1611

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
TRISTAN MARSHALL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Proper Context

Recent moves by New Historicists to evaluate theatrical material from the early modern period have been at the expense of what historians would recognize as acceptable use of historical context. One of the most glaring examples of the dangers of taking a play out of such a proper context has been The Tempest. The play has had a great deal of literary criticism devoted to it, attempting to fit it into comfortable twentieth-century clothing in regard to its commentary on empire, at the expense of what the play's depiction of imperialism meant for the year 1611 when it was written. The purpose of this paper will therefore be to suggest that the play does not actually call into question the Jacobean process of colonization across the Atlantic at all, and suggests that of more importance for its audience would have been the depiction of the hegemony of the island nation of Great Britain as recreated in 1603. Such a historical reconstruction is helped through contrasting Shakespeare's play with the Jonson, Chapman, and Marston collaboration, Eastward Ho, as well as with the anonymous Masque of Flowers and Chapman's Memorable Masque. These works will be used to illustrate just what colonialism might mean for the Jacobean audience when the Virginia project was invoked and suggest that an American tale The Tempest is not.

The I/Eye of the Storm: Prospero’s Tempest

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-255
Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Ecological Significance ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Celestial Sphere

The Tempest (1611) is a play often quoted for its ecological significance: indeed, it is one in which Shakespeare once again addresses the question of climate and the four elements in his revisiting of the early modern travel narratives (in which, incidentally, the motif of the fiery ocean was a topos of the genre). In this rewriting of Virgil’s Aeneid not entirely devoid of Homeric reminiscences, the playwright returns to the initial questions of the Dream: can men and women rule the elements? If we trigger off a climatic disorder, can it be mended? And if we lose control, what may then ensue? The playwright thus reassesses the role of man’s ‘potent art’ (5.1.50) in the ordering of nature. Chapter 7 explores the idea of temperance in connection with that of temperate clime, and it shows that Prospero’s tempest, meant both as a form of revenge against Antonio and as a means of catharsis and rebirth, is deeply problematic as it oscillates between the illusory and the real, magic and science, the sublime and the mundane. Providing us with kaleidoscopic views, the play cogently explores the power of the elements and reaffirms that, for Shakespeare, what appears in the celestial sphere cannot be dissociated from what happens on earth.

Learning Mingled with Nobility in Shakespeare’s England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Marston ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Samuel Daniel ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aristocratic Culture

Chapter 2.3 analyses the English school of Montaigne in the context of the relationship between Renaissance education and the early modern nobility. The Englished Montaigne––translated by John Florio and dramatized by Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and others––was introduced as a critic of the tyranny of custom and as a participant in the aristocratic culture of private learning in the late Elizabethan, early Jacobean noble household. Documents discussed range from the paratexts to Florio’s translation and the English text of ‘Of the institution and education of children’ to James Cleland’s work on the same subject and the famous portrait of Lady Anne Clifford. The chapter ends by offering a new perspective on Shakespeare’s use of Florio’s translation in The Tempest: that we should understand it in relation to Samuel Daniel’s use of similar passages in a play staged for the 1605 royal progress to the University of Oxford: The Queenes Arcadia.

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.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document