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Hamlin's study provides the first full-scale account of the reception and literary appropriation of ancient scepticism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (c. 1570-1630). Offering abundant archival evidence as well as fresh treatments of Florio's Montaigne and Bacon's career-long struggle with the challenges of epistemological doubt, Hamlin's book explores the deep connections between scepticism and tragedy in plays ranging from Doctor Faustus and Troilus and Cressida to The Tragedy of Mariam , The Duchess of Malfi , and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore .
The central thesis of this book is that skepticism was instrumental to the defense of orthodox religion and the development of the identity of the Church of England. Examining the presence of skepticism in non-fiction prose literature at four transitional moments in English Protestant history during which orthodoxy was challenged and revised, Melissa Caldwell argues that a skeptical mode of thinking is embedded in the literary and rhetorical choices made by English writers who straddle the project of reform and the maintenance of orthodoxy after the Reformation in England. Far from being a radical belief simply indicative of an emerging secularism, she demonstrates the varied and complex appropriations of skeptical thought in early modern England. By examining a selection of various kinds of literature-including religious polemic, dialogue, pamphlets, sermons, and treatises-produced at key moments in early modern England’s religious history, Caldwell shows how the writers under consideration capitalized on the unscripted moral space that emerged in the wake of the Reformation. The result was a new kind of discourse--and a new form of orthodoxy--that sought both to exploit and to contain the skepticism unearthed by the Reformation.
Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Shakespeare.
Through sustained close-readings of Montaigne's essays and Shakespeare's plays, Platt explores both authors' approaches to self, knowledge and form that stress fractures, interruptions and alternatives.
An investigation of how Renaissance English revenge drama carried out important ethical work through audience participation and metatheatre.
Encompassing nearly a century of drama, this is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy. Considering the antecedents of the form in Roman, late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century drama, it analyses its diversity, its theatrical functions and its socio-political significances. Containing detailed case-studies of the plays of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Middleton and Davenant, this collection will equip students in their own close-readings of texts, providing them with an indepth knowledge of the verbal and dramaturgical aspects of the form. Informed by rich theatrical and historical understanding, the essays reveal the larger connections between Shakespeare's use of the soliloquy and its deployment by his fellow dramatists.
This book explores how far some leading philosophers, from Montaigne to Hume, used Academic Scepticism to build their own brand of scepticism or took it as its main sceptical target. The book offers a detailed view of the main modern key figures, including Sanches, Charron, La Mothe Le Vayer, Bacon, Gassendi, Descartes, Malebranche, Pascal, Foucher, Huet, and Bayle. In addition, it provides a comprehensive assessment of the role of Academic Scepticism in Early Modern philosophy and a complete survey of the period. As a whole, the book offers a basis for a new, balanced assessment of the role played by scepticism in both its forms. Since Richard Popkin's works, there has been considerable interest in the role played by Pyrrhonian Scepticism in Early Modern Philosophy. Comparatively, Academic Scepticism was much neglected by scholars, despite some scattered important contributions. Furthermore, a general assessment of the presence of Academic Scepticism in Early Modern Philosophy is lacking. This book fills the void.
This book sets Shakespeare in the religious context of his times, presenting a balanced, up-to-date account of current biographical and critical debates, and addressing the fascinating, under-studied topic of how Shakespeare's writing was perceived by literary contemporaries - both Catholic and Protestant - whose priorities were more obviously religious than his own. It advances new readings of several plays, especially Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale; these draw in many cases on new and under-exploited contemporary analogues, ranging from conversion narratives, books of devotion and polemical pamphlets to manuscript drama and emblems. Shakespeare's writing has been seen both as profoundly religious, giving everyday human life a sacramental quality, and as profoundly secular, foreshadowing the kind of humanism that sees no necessity for God. This study attempts to reconcile these two points of view, describing a writer whose language is saturated in religious discourse and whose dramaturgy is highly attentive to religious precedent, but whose invariable practice is to subordinate religious matter to the particular aesthetic demands of the work in hand. For Shakespeare, as for few of his contemporaries, the Judaeo-Christian story is something less than a master narrative.
Character and the Individual Personality in English Renaissance Drama: Tragedy, History, Tragicomedy studies instantiations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside such fraught questions as the history of Renaissance subjectivity and individualism on the one hand and Shakespearean exceptionalism on the other, we can find that in some plays, by a range of different authors and collaborators, a conception has been evidenced of who a particular person is, and has been used to drive the action. This evidence can take into account a number of internal and external factors that might differentiate a person, and can do so drawing on the intellectual context in a number of ways. Ideas with potential to emphasize the special over the general in envisioning the person might come from training in dialectic (thesis vs hypothesis) or in rhetoric (ethopoeia), from psychological frameworks (casuistry, humor theory, and their interpenetration), or from historiography (exemplarity). But though they depicted what we would call personality only intermittently, and with assumptions different from our own about personhood, dramatists sometimes made a priority of representing the workings of a specific mind: the patterns of thought and feeling that set a person off as that person and define that person singularly rather than categorically. Some individualistic characters can be shown to emerge where we do not expect, such as with Fletcherian personae like Amintor, Arbaces, and Montaigne of The Honest Man’s Fortune; some are drawn by playwrights often uninterested in character, such as Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Jonson’s Cicero, and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck; and some appear in being constructed differently from others by the same author, as when Webster’s Bosola is set in contrast to Flamineo, and Marlowe’s Faustus is set against Barabas. But Shakespearean characters are also examined for the particular manner in which each troubles the categorical and exhibits a personality: Othello, Good Duke Humphrey, and Marc Antony. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
During the Renaissance, moral philosophy came to permeate the minds of many, including the spectators that poured into Shakespeare's Globe theatre. Examining these strains of thought that formed the basis for humanism, Raspa delves into King Lear, Hamlet, among others to unlock what influence this had on both Shakespeare and his interpreters.