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It has often been stressed that The Tempest is Shakespeare's most musical play: 1 the island's soundscape is uniquely rich and varied, its ‘noises,/Sounds, and sweet airs’ (3.2.127–8) enhance its supernatural atmosphere and Prospero's magic power is wielded largely through the music of Ariel and his fellow spirits. Unsurprisingly, music is one of the aspects of the play that has received the most critical attention, the perfect integration of this ‘dangerously refractory material
It has traditionally been held that Robert Southwell's poetry offers a curious view of Elizabethan England from the restricted perspective of a priest-hole. This book takes apart that idea – and the poetry – word by word and discovers layers of new meanings, hidden emblems and sharp critiques of Elizabeth's courtiers, and even of the ageing queen herself. Using the most recent edition of Southwell's poetry and manuscript materials, it addresses both poetry and private writings, including letters and diary material, to give context to the radicalisation of a generation of Southwell's countrymen and women. The book shows how the young Jesuit harnessed both drama and literature to give new poetic poignancy to their experience. Bringing a forensic approach to Southwell's ‘lighter’ pieces, it shows the extent to which Southwell engaged exclusively through them in direct artistic debate with Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare, placing the poetry firmly in the English landscape familiar to Southwell's generation. Those concerned with early modern and Elizabethan culture will find much of interest in this study, including insights into the function of the arts in the private Catholic milieu, touched by Southwell in so many ways and places, from William Byrd's holy music to Mary Stuart's coded embroideries.
This book presents a biography of the poetics and politics of London in 1613, from Whitehall to Guildhall, that is, Shakespeare's London. It examines major events at court, such as the untimely death of Prince Henry and its aftermath, and the extravagant wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick of Germany and her journey to the Continent. The city flourished with scores of publications on a vast array of topics, including poetry, travel narratives, music, and, of course, plays. The book offers summaries and analyses of most of these texts, knowing that some of them may not be well-known to all readers. Many of these publications had a kind of link to the court. In order to understand the context of the year 1613, the book actually begins in October 1612 with Prince Henry's illness and death in November, which had a major impact on what happened in 1613. It proceeds more or less chronologically from this event to Princess Elizabeth's wedding and the stunning array of dramatic performances at court, and includes the journey to her new home in Germany. As part of the year's cultural nexus, the narrative reaches into the Guildhall experience to explore the riches of the books that emanated from London's printers and to examine specifically the drama performed or published in 1613. The final major focus centres on the Carr-Howard wedding at the year's end, full of cultural activities and ripe with political significance.
‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ Twelfth Night Ever since the seventeenth century, Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted into musical forms, whether lyric, symphonic, balletic, or operatic, 1
thousand times. In the original play, Julius Caesar rebukes his wife, Calpurnia, who, after a nocturnal vision, pleads with him not to go to the Senate that day and insists that ‘cowards die many times’. 10 The fact that Ford shifts to the singular is itself the recycling of a prior cinematic appropriation – the deliberate misquoting by a scam artist in The Music Man (1962). 11 The dialogics at issue not only underscore the confidence game Ford is playing with this host, who, whenever he is resuscitated, fully believes in the role of the romantic gunslinger with
drive off, Seth emerges from the saloon. Trixie and Sol note in anticipation the brief exchange of forlorn gazes between the bride and the sheriff before he walks away towards the home where his wife is waiting. The scene, however, is not over yet. An ecstatic Jane calls out, ‘we ain’t done fucking dancing’, and the music strikes up again, bringing with it what As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing anticipate – more revelry. This time, all those touched by the standoff between Al and his new adversary are not onlookers. Doc is not the only one dancing with
their exclusion by ecclesiastical authorities. 2 Early modern women’s churching ceremonies were closely associated with Candlemas, or the Feast of the Virgin Mary’s Purification, and the two shared many elements: in particular, processions with candles and, as discussed in this chapter, music. For members of the urban middle class of the early sixteenth century, both Catholic and early
Serial Shakespeare explores the dissemination and reassemblage of Shakespeare’s plays in contemporary media culture, regarding the way this taps into but also transforms his preferred themes, concerns and constellations of characters. The appropriations discussed include isolated citations in Westworld and The Wire, a typology of the first female president modelled on figures of female sovereignty, as well as a discussion of what one might call a specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy in Deadwood and The Americans. By proposing a reciprocal exchange between the early modern plays and contemporary serial TV drama, the book focusses on the transhistoric and transmedial dialogue a revisitation of the Bard entails. The readings consider the Shakespeare text again, from a different perspective, but also address the fact that his text comes back to us again, from the past. The book claims that serial TV drama keeps appropriating Shakespeare to give voice to unfinished cultural business regarding the state of the American nation because both share the sense of writing in and for a period of interim. Given that the Bard continues to write and read America, what the book draws into focus is how both scriptwriters and cultural critics can, by repurposing him, come up with narratives that are appropriate to our times.
first performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet , written circa 1593 and published in 1597 – whereas Twelfth Night must have been written after the visit of Virginio Orsini to London and before its first performance before Elizabeth on 27 December 1601. Secondly, everyone knows Twelfth Night begins ‘If music be the food of love’ not ‘What country, friends, is
events in 1603–4. Sonnets 1–103 largely concern the speaker’s association with a self-centred Young Man, and they likely belong to a period between 1594 and 1596 with subsequent revisions in the first sixty or so poems. 26 An example from the Dark Lady group is sonnet 128 (‘How oft, when thou my music music play’st’). 27 The poem depicts the