Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance
Author: Velma Bourgeois Richmond
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2015-12-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474247490

This book assesses William Shakespeare in the context of political and religious crisis, paying particular attention to his Catholic connections, which have heretofore been underplayed by much Protestant interpretation. Bourgeois Richmond's most important contribution is to study the genre of romance in its guise as a 'cover' for recusant Catholicism, drawing on a long tradition of medieval-religious plays devoted to the propagation of Catholic religious faith.

Shakespeare on Love

Shakespeare on Love
Author: Joseph Pearce
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2013-03-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1681494337

Having given the evidence for William Shakespeare's Catholicism in two previous books, literary biographer Joseph Pearce turns his attention in this work to the Bard's most famous play, Romeo and Juliet. "Star-crossed" Romeo and Juliet are Shakespeare's most famous lovers and perhaps the most well-known lovers in literary history. Though the young pair has been held up as a romantic ideal, the play is a tragedy, ending in death. What then, asks Pearce, is Shakespeare saying about his protagonists? Are they the hapless victims of fate, or are they partly to blame for their deaths? Is their love the "real thing", or is it self-indulgent passion? And what about the adults in their lives? Did they give the young people the example and guidance that they needed? The Catholic understanding of sexual desire, and its need to be ruled by reason, is on display in Romeo and Juliet, argues Pearce. The play is not a paean to romance but a cautionary tale about the naïveté and folly of youthful infatuation and the disastrous consequences of poor parenting. The well-known characters and their oft-quoted lines are rich in symbolic meaning that points us in the direction of the age-old wisdom of the Church. Although such a reading of Romeo and Juliet is countercultural in an age that glorifies the heedless and headless heart of young love, Pearce makes his case through a meticulous engagement with Shakespeare and his age and with the text of the play itself.

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages
Author: Alfred Thomas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-06-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319902180

Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Deep Wisdom from Shakespeare's Dramas

Deep Wisdom from Shakespeare's Dramas
Author: Arjan Plaisier
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2012-06-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1620320606

Arjan Plaisier believes audiences who view Shakespeare performances and readers who study the plays deserve better than some of the recent interpretations of the Bard's work. In their attempt to be "modern," these interpreters commit historical amnesia by slighting the Christian ethos of the early Renaissance period in which Shakespeare wrote and by riding roughshod over the religious underpinnings of his plays. This neglect skews the playwright's intentions, confuses the audience, and diminishes the full effect of the play. Plaisier, too, is modern--and in a more profound sense. He sets forth how Shakespeare shapes his plots to conform at an ultimate level to timeless biblical narrative patterns (like Northrop Frye, he regards the Bible as a "code book"), so that there is a "right" ending to the work. And in an Appendix, Plaisier provides some kindly advice to his fellow pastors. You do well, he says to them, to enrich your noble calling with attention to literature. To do this, he says, you will find Shakespeare most helpful. Yes, and Plaisier's perceptive essays point to the deep wisdom in Shakespeare by which we can all live.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition)
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2010-05-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393079848

Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.

Texts and Traditions

Texts and Traditions
Author: Beatrice Groves
Publisher: Oxford English Monographs
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2007
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0199208980

Explores Shakespeare's engagement with the religious culture of his time. Through readings of a number of plays - "Romeo and Juliet", "King John", "1 Henry IV", "Henry V", and "Measure for Measure", this work explains allusions to the Bible, the Church's liturgy, and to the mystery plays performed in England in Shakespeare's boyhood.

Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith

Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith
Author: J. Mayer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2006-08-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230595898

This book throws new light on the issue of the dramatist's religious orientation by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars. It is argued that faith was a quest rather than a quiet certainty for the playwright.

Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale
Author: Martina Zamparo
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2022-10-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 303105167X

This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play’s circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare’s play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter’s Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James’s conciliatory attitude.

Shakespeare's Theatre

Shakespeare's Theatre
Author: Hugh Macrae Richmond
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780826477767

Under an alphabetical list of relevant terms, names and concepts, the book reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins>

Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness

Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness
Author: Maurice Hunt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2019-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351149229

Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness complicates debates about whether Shakespeare's plays are fundamentally Protestant or Catholic in sympathy, challenging analyses that either find Protestant elements consistently undercutting Catholic motifs or, less often, discover evidence of the playwright's endorsement of Catholic doctrine and customs. Rather, Maurice Hunt argues that Shakespeare's syncretistic method of incorporating both Protestant and Catholic elements into his plays was singular among early modern English playwrights at a time when governmental and social tolerance of Protestantism in the theatre was high and criticism of stereotyped Catholicism was correspondingly rampant in drama. In-depth discussions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Second Henriad, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, and Othello reveal how Shakespeare allusively integrates Reformation Protestant and Roman Catholic motifs and systems of thought. This book sheds new light on the playwright's knowledge of and interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean religious debates over the nature of spiritual reformation, the efficacy of merit for redemption, and the operation of Providence. It will appeal not only to Shakespeare scholars but to those interested in the cultural history of the Reformation.