The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge

The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge PDF

Author: Hilary Gatti

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-02-15

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1136183000

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Giordano Bruno’s visit to Elizabethan England in the 1580s left its imprint on many fields of contemporary culture, ranging from the newly-developing science, the philosophy of knowledge and language, to the extraordinary flowering of Elizabethan poetry and drama. This book explores Bruno's influence on English figures as different as the ninth Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Harriot, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Originally published in 1989, it is of interest to students and teachers of history of ideas, cultural history, European drama and renaissance England. Bruno's work had particular power and emphasis in the modern world due to his response to the cultural crisis which had developed - his impulse towards a new ‘faculty of knowing’ had a disruptive effect on existing orthodoxies – religious, scientific, philosophical, and political.

Playing the Globe

Playing the Globe PDF

Author: John Gillies

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780838637395

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The essays collected here explore the representation of contemporary cartographic knowledge within a variety of English Renaissance dramatic texts. Including a preface and introduction that contextualize English cartographic awareness in the late sixteenth century, Playing the Globe provides a wide-ranging exploration of the rich variety of mental maps that shaped England's attitudes toward itself and others and continues to affect the ways in which the Anglo-American world imagines itself.

Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Literary Theory

Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Literary Theory PDF

Author: Andrew Mousley

Publisher: MacMillan

Published: 2000-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780333694596

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Unlike many introductions to literary theory, this text offers a sustained discussion of a specific period of English Literature. Avoiding the danger of employing theories as templates, it uses Renaissance drama and literary theory to question and illuminate each other. Love, money, alienation and exotic death are amongst the various topics discussed. The book also provides a comprehensive account of literary theory's complex relationship with its main predecessor, humanism. In all, 17 plays are discussed including well known texts, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Duchess of Malfi, as well as less studied plays such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Shoemakers' Holiday.

Early Responses to Renaissance Drama

Early Responses to Renaissance Drama PDF

Author: Charles Whitney

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-08-31

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13: 0521858437

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A study of early responses to the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Renaissance dramatists.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England PDF

Author: John Leeds Barroll

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 1996-03

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780838636411

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Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing essays and studies as well as book reviews of the many significant books and essays dealing with the cultural history of medieval and early modern England as expressed by and realized in its drama exclusive of Shakespeare.

The Subject of Tragedy (Routledge Revivals)

The Subject of Tragedy (Routledge Revivals) PDF

Author: Catherine Belsey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1317744438

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First published in 1985, The Subject of Tragedy takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for an analysis of the differential identities of man and woman. Catherine Belsey charts, in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity that is identifiably modern. The subject of liberal humanism – self-determining, free origin of language, choice and action – is highlighted as the product of a specific period in which man was the subject to which woman was related.

Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature

Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature PDF

Author: Jessica Wolfe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-05-03

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780521831871

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This book explores how machinery and the practice of mechanics participate in the intellectual culture of Renaissance humanism. Before the emergence of the modern concept of technology, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers recognized the applicability of mechanical practices and objects to some of their most urgent moral, aesthetic, and political questions. The construction, use, and representation of devices including clocks, scientific instruments, stage machinery, and war engines not only reflect but also actively reshape how Renaissance writers define and justify artifice and instrumentality - the reliance upon instruments, mechanical or otherwise, to achieve a particular end. Harnessing the discipline of mechanics to their literary and philosophical concerns, scholars and poets including Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, George Chapman, and Gabriel Harvey look to machinery to ponder and dispute all manner of instrumental means, from rhetoric and pedagogy to diplomacy and courtly dissimulation.

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry PDF

Author: Wendy Beth Hyman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-04-04

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 019257440X

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Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers' anticipated decline, and—quite stunningly given the Reformation context—humanity's relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian 'desert of vast Eternity.' In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poets invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric's own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, positioned it to grapple with these 'impossible' metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, the book also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyrical mode. Carpe diem's revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.

Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture

Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture PDF

Author: Ryan Curtis Friesen

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1837641587

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Brings together authors of fiction with philosophers and academics in Early Modern England and compares their ways of describing and understanding the world; Explores popular culture as well as the culture of the learned and elite; Examines the intellectual consequences of the Reformation and compares the spiritual and doctrinal practices of the occult to those of orthodoxy. Magic and the supernatural are common themes in the philosophy and fiction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture explores varieties of scepticism and belief exhibited by a selection of philosophers and playwrights, including Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton, explicating how each author defines the supernatural, whether he assumes magic to operate in the world, and how he uses occult principles to explain what can be known and what is ethical. Beliefs and claims concerning impossible phenomena and superhuman agency require literary historians to determine whether an occult system of magical operation is being described in a given text. Each chapter in this volume evaluates whether a chosen early modern author is endorsing magic as efficacious or divinely sanctioned, or criticizing it for being fraudulent or unholy. By examining works of fiction, it is possible to explore fantastic settings which were not intended to be synonymous with the early modern audiences everyday experience, settings where magic exists and operates according to the playwrights designs. This book also sets out to determine what historical sources provided given authors with knowledge of the occult and speculates on how aware an audience would have been of academic, classical, or popular contexts surrounding the text at hand.

Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder

Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder PDF

Author: T. G. Bishop

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-01-18

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0521550866

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Playwrights throughout history have used the emotion of wonder to explore the relation between feeling and knowing in the theatre. In Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, T. G. Bishop argues that wonder provides a turbulent space, rich at once in emotion and self-consciousness, where the nature and value of knowing is brought into question. Bishop compares the treatment of wonder in classical philosophy and drama, and goes on to examine English cycle-plays, charting wonder's ambivalent relation to dogma and sacrament in the medieval religious theatre. Through extended readings of three of Shakespeare's plays - The Comedy of Errors, Pericles and The Winter's Tale - Bishop argues that Shakespeare uses wonder as a key component of his dialectic between affirmation and critique. Wonder is shown as vital to the characteristic self-consciousness of Shakespeare's plays as acts of narrative enquiry and renovation.