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Act 3, scene 2, of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale ends with Leontes’ terrible recognition of what his jealous imagination has cost him, and it also initiates the play’s movement into the world of fairytale. The 2011 Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by David Farr included a dramatic demonstration of this shift: the towering bookshelves that had flanked the stage
the narrator and his readers. Though much of the narrative links proper pleasure and pedagogy, in the final moments of the text there is a break with the readers that has been anticipated by the alienation of Pastorella’s recognition, explored in Chapter 5 . In The Faerie Queene as a whole, conclusions to the individual books tend to emphasize not so much the completion of a quest, but the
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance about the pastoral exploits of the princes Musidorus and Pyrocles (aka Zelmane the amazon) remains one of the defining works of English fiction. The New Arcadia – the revised, unfinished version first published in print in 1590 – differs from its more widely known cousin the Old Arcadia, which circulated in manuscript during Sidney’s lifetime, in two major points. The first of these is its ambitious, non-chronological approach to the narrative, resulting in crucial plot details (and even the true identities of the main protagonists) being initially withheld from the reader. The second difference is in the New Arcadia’s rhetorically elaborate style, which consolidated Sidney’s reputation most skilled prose stylists of the English Renaissance. This edition of the New Arcadia is the first in 37 years and combines the text of Victor Skretkowicz’s seminal 1987 edition with a substantially expanded commentary and additional long notes on the book’s history in print and Sidney’s use of rhetorical devices.
, love, labor, and learning, emphasizing the reader’s or student’s recognition of their active role in the learning process rather than pleasing deception. The project of distinguishing oneself as a member of a social elite, central to Castiglione, does not disappear in Ascham, but is uneasily mapped onto his joint project of defining a gentle pedagogical program for the gentility and critiquing the self
demonstrates a lack of recognition of his own deeds; he paradoxically fashions an identity for himself that relies on a deflection of his own responsibility. Phedon makes fortune the driving force of his story when he passively exclaims to Guyon: “Fayre Sir … what man can shun the hap, / That hidden lyes vnwares him to surpryse? / Misfortune waites aduantage to entrap / The man most wary in her whelming
recognition scenes when an apparently rustic young woman (Pastorella in The Faerie Queene , Perdita in The Winter’s Tale ) is recognized to be of noble birth, I examine how both authors insist on the obvious fictionality of their work. Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s texts reject the hidden art of sprezzatura and instead make use of metapoetry and metatheater, directly
fable but the exegetical nonfiction that shocks David into self-recognition. This is an exciting thought for critics and professors, even if poets might argue that, as Sidney himself says, the stricken monarch responded to Nathan's admonition by shaping his repentance into ‘that heavenly psalm of mercy’, almost certainly the penitential Psalm 51, set in the Christian liturgy for Ash Wednesday as a pattern for all sinners (the penitential psalms were regularly read as referring to the Bathsheba affair; Figure 6.2 ). Indeed, in the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter Sidney
resonate suggestively in our media-conscious present, including Nashe's concern for his public image and reception, attention to the mostly unregulated dissemination of self-perpetuating discourse within a commercial sphere, and satirical takes on prevalent social and cultural expectations. NEWS, PERFORMANCE, AND THE MARKETPLACE OF PRINT In the 1970s J. B. Steane could confidently comment on Nashe's status as a minor Elizabethan writer who deserved greater recognition than he is given as a ‘formidable controversialist’ and a
extra-winged Mercury in Have With You , then, he indirectly acknowledges that publications such as Pierce Penniless (1592) might be aptly termed ‘Paper-monster[s]’ not only in recognition of their pulpy membranes and inky veins but also for their affinity with the insubstantial fictions that an adversarial Stephen Gosson decried in The School of Abuse (1579): mass-marketed ‘windball[s]’ that are ‘puffed up’ like puppets with ‘browne paper’, with ‘tow’, and – at least figuratively – with overblown discourse. 22
, Dal “Cortegiano” all’ “Uomo di mondo” , 51–59. Javitch describes his recognition that “Castiglione had deliberately refused to write a prescriptive manual” despite the possibility that the book “tended to be mistaken by Tudor readers as a practical handbook of manners” (Preface to The Book of the Courtier , vii