Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays

Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays
Author: Cristina León Alfar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134773455

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare’s work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men’s accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men’s superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women’s bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women’s agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare’s cuckoldry plays, women’s rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to “shift it” as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
Author: Domenico Lovascio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2020-04-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501514059

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture

Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture
Author: Cora Fox
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526137151

What did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing.

Crimes of Passion Since Shakespeare

Crimes of Passion Since Shakespeare
Author: Adrian Howe
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1000873846

Bringing key Shakespeare texts into dialogue with feminist socio-legal research, this book investigates the notion of a ‘crime of passion’ – indicatively, wife-killing. Its key concern is to bring attention to a cultural and legal revolution widely overlooked even in the law field where it occurred. In 2009, the English Parliament passed a controversial law abolishing the defence of provocation. Explaining the new law, reformers said that this so-called ‘heat of passion’ defence had allowed men to get away with murder by blaming the victim. Abolishing it in cases of alleged ‘infidelity’ would ‘end the culture of excuses’. Unpacking what was at stake in the reformers’ revolutionary challenge to the English law of murder’s age-old concession to ‘human frailty’ in ‘red mist’ rage cases, this book charts passion’s progress in wife-killing cases over the centuries. It commences in the early modern era when jurists were busy distinguishing murder from manslaughter and, contemporaneously, Shakespeare set about querying culturally inscribed excuses for femicide in his plays, Titus Andronicus and Othello. This book will appeal to feminist and socio-legal scholars, criminologists and those working in the fields of law and literature, legal theory and Shakespeare studies. More widely, it will appeal to anyone interested in so-called ‘crimes of passion’.

Shakespeare and Happiness

Shakespeare and Happiness
Author: Kathleen French
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2022-02-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000541592

Shakespeare and Happiness is a study of attitudes to happiness in the early modern period and in Shakespeare’s plays. It considers the conflicting influences of religion and Aristotelian philosophy in shaping attitudes to the possibility of attaining happiness. By being the first book to focus specifically on the representation of happiness in Shakespeare’s plays, it contributes to feminist approaches to Shakespeare by foregrounding the important role of women in showing the right way to live and achieve happiness. timely criticism, as it considers Shakespeare in the current context of the #MeToo movement providing new insights to studies of the emotions by approaching them from the perspective of research conducted by positive psychologists. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines methodologies from literature, psychology philosophy, religion and history, emphasizing the richness and complexity of Shakespeare’s exploration of the nature of happiness.

Hamlet’s Hereditary Queen

Hamlet’s Hereditary Queen
Author: Kerrie Roberts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000821358

This book explores a fresh and insightful interpretation of Hamlet’s Gertrude as a prominent and powerful figure in the play. It shows how traditional readings of this character, both performance-based and scholarly, have been guided and constrained by misogynistic perspectives on female power. Bringing together the author’s wealth of insight from a theatre practitioner’s perspective and combining it with a scholarly perspective, the book argues that Gertrude need not be limited to sex and motherhood. She could instead be played as Denmark’s blood royal Queen, her role in the play then being about female political power. Gertrude’s royal status could play out on stage through a variety of possible performance choices for stage design, stage business, acting processes, and the actor’s presence – both speaking and silent. Hamlet's Hereditary Queen takes into consideration Shakespeare’s source myths, historical studies of the position of queens and the issues concerning them in early modern England, Hamlet’s performance history, and the text itself. It questions traditional readings of Hamlet, and offers detailed analyses of relevant scenes to demonstrate how Gertrude’s Hamlet might play out on stage in the twenty-first century. This is an engaging and insightful interpretation for students and scholars of theatre and performance studies and Shakespeare studies, as well as theatre practitioners.

Shakespeare and Disgust

Shakespeare and Disgust
Author: Bradley J. Irish
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2023-02-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350214000

Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools – poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities – to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour – and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.

Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2004
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0743482751

Shakespearean comedy about two pairs of lovers-- one pair kept apart by a vicious outsider, the other by their own pride and distrust.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 282
Release: 19??
Genre: Criticism
ISBN: 1604136316

Presents a collection of critical essays on the comedic works of William Shakespeare.

Theatre History Studies 2021, Vol 40

Theatre History Studies 2021, Vol 40
Author: Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 081737115X

A peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference Introduction —LISA JACKSON-SCHEBETTA, WITH ODAI JOHNSON, CHRYSTYNA DAIL, AND JONATHAN SHANDELL PART I STUDIES IN THEATRE HISTORY Un-Reading Voltaire: The Ghost in the Cupboard of the House of Reason —ODAI JOHNSON Caricatured, Marginalized, and Erased: African American Artists and Philadelphia’s Negro Unit of the FTP, 1936–1939 —JONATHAN SHANDELL Stop Your Sobbing: White Fragility, Slippery Empathy, and Historical Consciousness in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate —SCOTT PROUDFIT Asia and Alwin Nikolais: Interdisciplinarity, Orientalist Tendencies, and Midcentury American Dance —ANGELA K. AHLGREN PART II WITCH CHARACTERS AND WITCHY PERFORMANCE Editor’s Introduction to the Special Section Shifting Shapes: Witch Characters and Witchy Performances —CHRYSTYNA DAIL To Wright the Witch: The Case of Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft —JANE BARNETTE Nothing Wicked This Way Comes: Shakespeare’s Subversion of Archetypal Witches in The Winter’s Tale —JESSICA HOLT Of Women and Witches: Performing the Female Body in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom —MAMATA SENGUPTA (Un)Limited: The Influence of Mentorship and Father-Daughter Relationships on Elphaba’s Heroine Journey in Wicked —REBECCA K. HAMMONDS Immersive Witches: New York City under the Spell of Sleep No More and Then She Fell —DAVID BISAHA PART III Essay from the Conference The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2020 New Conventions for a New Generation: High School Musicals and Broadway in the 2010s —LINDSEY MANTOAN