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Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court constitutes the first full-length study of Jacobean nuptial performance, a hitherto unexplored branch of early modern theater consisting of masques and entertainments performed for high-profile weddings. Scripted by such writers as Ben Jonson, Thomas Campion, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont, these entertainments were mounted for some of the most significant political events of James's English reign. Here Kevin Curran analyzes all six of the elite weddings celebrated at the Jacobean court, reading the masques and entertainments that headlined these events alongside contemporaneously produced panegyrics, festival books, sermons, parliamentary speeches, and other sources. The study shows how, collectively, wedding entertainments turned the idea of union into a politically versatile category of national representation and offered new ways of imagining a specifically Jacobean form of national identity by doing so.
This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors.
This book explores the unedited material contained in the Hawthornden manuscripts of William Fowler, a Scottish poet attached to the court of Queen Anna of Denmark between 1590 and 1612. The material is representative of Fowler’s ephemeral and occasional production, largely unknown to modern scholars. Through the lenses of the Hawthornden fragments, this book engages in the exploration of one of the "cultural places of the European Renaissance", represented by the extensive use of emblems and other literary devices, and by the use of manuscript copies to circulate them. The discourse mainly focuses on the Jacobean courtly establishment in the first decade of the seventeenth century, from the point of view of a Scottish insider. By focusing on the intellectual makeup of the court in the newly united Great Britain, this work aims at bridging manuscript scholarship and literary studies with a wider perspective on contemporary society, politics and culture.
In the Renaissance period the body emerges as the repository of social and cultural forces and a privileged metaphor for political practices and legal codification. Due to its ambivalent expressive force, it represents the seat and the means for the performance of normative identity and at the same time of alterity. The essays of the collection address the manifold articulations of this topic, demonstrating how the inscription of the body within the discursive spheres of gender identity, sexuality, law, and politics align its materiality with discourses whose effects are themselves material. The aesthetic and performative dimension of law inform the debates on the juridical constitution of authority, as well as its reflection on the formation and the moulding of individual subjectivity. Moreover, the inherently theatrical elements of the law find an analogy in the popular theatre, where juridical practices are represented, challenged, occasionally subverted or created. The works analyzed in the volume, in their ample spectre of topics and contexts aim at demonstrating how in the Renaissance period the body was the privileged focus of the social, legal and cultural imagination.
From the exemplary to the notorious to the obscure, this comprehensive and innovative encyclopedia showcases the worthy women of early modern England. Poets, princesses, or pirates, the women of power and agency found in these pages are indeed worth knowing, and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in early modern studies. Rather than using the conventional alphabetical format of the standard biographical encyclopedia, this volume is divided into categories of women. Since many women will fit in more than one category, each woman is placed in the category that best exemplifies her life, and is cross referenced in other appropriate sections. This structure makes the book an interesting read for seasoned scholars of early modern women, while students need not already be familiar with these subjects in order to benefit from the text. Another unusual feature of this reference work is that each entry begins with some incident from the woman’s life that is particularly exciting or significant. Some entries are very brief while others are extensive. Each includes a source listing. The book is well illustrated and liberally sprinkled with quotations of the time either by or about the women in the text.
Selected contributions to the most prestigious international event in Shakespeare studies, the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress (2011), represent major trends in the field in historical and present-day contexts. Special attention is given to the impact of Shakespeare on diverse cultures, from the Native Americans to China and Japan.
Approaching the Stuart courts through the lens of the queen consort, Anna of Denmark, this study is underpinned by three key themes: translating cultures, female agency and the role of kinship networks and genealogical identity for early modern royal women. Illustrated with a fascinating array of objects and artworks, the book follows a trajectory that begins with Anna’s exterior spaces before moving to the interior furnishings of her palaces, the material adornment of the royal body, an examination of Anna’s visual persona and a discussion of Anna’s performance of extraordinary rituals that follow her life cycle. Underpinned by a wealth of new archival research, the book provides a richer understanding of the breadth of Anna’s interests and the meanings generated by her actions, associations and possessions.
This volume examines early modern representations of women’s reproductive knowledge through new readings of plays, monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, court records, histories, and more, which are often interpreted as depicting female reproductive bodies as passive, silenced objects of male control and critique. Luttfring argues instead that these texts represent women exercising epistemological control over reproduction through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance into what Luttfring calls 'bodily narratives.' The power of these bodily narratives extends beyond knowledge of individual bodies to include the ways that women’s stories about reproduction shape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and kings. In the popular print and theater of early modern England, women’s bodies, women’s speech, and in particular women’s speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. This book joins growing critical discussion of how female reproductive bodies were used to represent socio-political concerns and will be of interest to students and scholars working in early modern literature and culture, women’s history, and the history of medicine.
This book examines how early Stuart queens navigated their roles as political players and artistic patrons in a culture deeply conflicted about the legitimacy of female authority. Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria both employed powerful female archetypes such as Amazons and the Virgin Mary in court performances. Susan Dunn-Hensley analyzes how darker images of usurping, contaminating women, epitomized by the witch, often merged with these celebratory depictions. By tracing these competing representations through the Jacobean and Caroline periods, Dunn-Hensley peels back layers of misogyny from historical scholarship and points to rich new lines of inquiry. Few have written about Anna’s religious beliefs, and comparing her Catholicism with Henrietta Maria’s illuminates the ways in which both women were politically subversive. This book offers an important corrective to centuries of negative representation, and contributes to a fuller understanding of the role of queenship in the English Civil War and the fall of the Stuart monarchy.
"Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year--King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age forty-two, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn--King Lear--then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. It was a memorable year in England as well--and a grim one, in the aftermath of a terrorist plot conceived by a small group of Catholic gentry that had been uncovered at the last hour. The foiled Gunpowder Plot would have blown up the king and royal family along with the nation's political and religious leadership. The aborted plot renewed anti-Catholic sentiment and laid bare divisions in the kingdom. It was against this background that Shakespeare finished Lear, a play about a divided kingdom, then wrote a tragedy that turned on the murder of a Scottish king, Macbeth. He ended this astonishing year with a third masterpiece no less steeped in current events and concerns: Antony and Cleopatra. The Year of Lear sheds light on these three great tragedies by placing them in the context of their times, while also allowing us greater insight into how Shakespeare was personally touched by such events as a terrible outbreak of plague and growing religious divisions. For anyone interested in Shakespeare, this is an indispensable book"--