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Secondly, it will suggest that Markham’s practical manuals are rooted fundamentally in those earlier military-chivalric writings. Markham’s encyclopedia of everyday life should be thought of as a late and surprising flowering of Elizabethan Essexianism. ‘Essexianism’ is offered here as a coinage to describe the characteristic vocabulary, tropes, and even world-view of texts
Shakespeare and the supernatural explores the supernatural in Shakespearean drama, taking account of historical contexts and meanings together with contemporary approaches to these aspects in performance on stage, screen and in popular culture. Supernatural elements constitute a significant dimension of Shakespeare’s plays, contributing to their dramatic power and intrigue: ghosts haunt political spaces and psyches; witches foresee the future; fairies meddle with love; natural portents foreshadow events; and a magus conjures a tempest. Although written and performed for early modern audiences, for whom the supernatural was still part of the fabric of everyday life, the plays’ supernatural elements continue to enthral us and maintain their ability to raise questions in contemporary contexts. The collection considers a range of issues through the lens of five key themes: the supernatural and embodiment; haunted spaces; supernatural utterance and haunted texts; magic, music and gender; and present-day transformations. The volume presents an introduction to the field, covering terminology and the porous boundaries between ideas of nature, the preternatural and the supernatural, followed by twelve chapters from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars whose work interrogates the five themes. They provide new insights into the central issues of how Shakespeare constructs the supernatural through language and how supernatural dimensions raise challenges of representation and meaning for critics and creators. Shakespeare and the supernatural will appeal to scholars, dramatists, teachers and students, providing valuable resources for readers interested in Shakespeare or the supernatural in drama, whether from literary, historical, film or performing arts perspectives.
of recollection there lurked a complete narrative from which the business of everyday life had distracted him. In his attempt to reconstruct this organic original text he succeeded only in recovering ‘fragments’. Almost in anticipation of Coleridge’s account, William Scott’s unpublished The Model of Poetry ( c .1599) offers what is, perhaps, an anecdotal observation of the genesis of Virgil’s Aeneid that inverts the process in which art was said to augment Nature in the achievement of the poet
depend almost entirely on context, and on where the model sits in the dramatist’s memory. The dramatist here seems to be aping the logic that Hamlet later confronts in his exchange with the Gravedigger: both the register and references to immediate events are adjusted as occasion demands, and in a way that defeats grammatical logic and stable meaning. 62 It would be convenient to reach for Freud’s chapter on ‘Forgetting of proper names’ in his The Psychopathology of Everyday Life to explain this, except that in Freud’s case
early modern identity. 47 Although art historians have engaged with material culture and especially the ‘everyday’ life of the early modern English household, few literary scholars concerned with plays and the visual arts take into account the critical advances presented by these studies. 48 Critical opportunities are often missed as a result, because early modern English playwrights are themselves
Glasnevin Cemetery progresses, Bloom encounters more ghostly memories of his dead loved ones. This leads to Shari Benstock commenting that ‘Bloom is haunted by the ghost of his dead loved ones, is obsessed with his own dead past, is discovering on this day that the “spirit” world is very much a part of his everyday life’ ( Benstock, 1975 : 409). As I
bright hair about the bone’ to animate the poet’s corpse (6). Donne’s ‘images dramatize the movements of thoughts … drawn from everyday life: building, medicine, food, law’. At the heart of Donne’s metaphysical style, we find ‘elaborate tropes, ambiguous inverted syntax and abstract language’. 11 Bell quotes the Devotions as containing ‘what is perhaps the best account of Donne’s own language – attributed to God himself’: My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldest be
Richard Halpern has called a reduction of ‘a model based on the legal apparatuses of the state for one based on the practices of civil society’. 32 Halpern also notes that an early Latin primer, John Stanbridge’s Vulgaris ( c .1529) focused on ‘English phrases drawn from everyday life at school and home’, although he does not regard this as evidence of a tension between speech and the technologies of writing, but as part of a pedagogy that Erasmian humanism rejected ‘because they inculcated an inelegant and sub-literary Latin
the effects of witchcraft. The idea that magic was both natural and a part of everyday life allows us to reassess the fantasy worlds of Doctor Faustus , A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest , as well as Jonson’s satire on the popular faith in magic in The Alchemist. “Textual icons” is concerned with the practice of early modern book illustration. We tend
world depicted that is easily understood in the context of today – and therefore it takes very easily to a modern adaptation that places the action in a modern setting. First off, all the characters speak in languages that no one understands. Everywhere in the play there is cacophony: too many stimuli, too much politicking, not enough calm or everyday life. Does this sound familiar? Moreover, in the play