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5 Renaissance Dublin and the construction of literary authorship: Richard Bellings, James Shirley and Henry Burnell Marie-Louise Coolahan That quintessentially Renaissance literary project – the humanist dialogue translated – was apparently undertaken in Dublin in the early 1580s by the colonial administrator and writer Lodowick Bryskett. Not published until 1606, Bryskett’s A discourse of civill life (adapted from the Italian Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio’s Tre dialoghi della vita civile of 1565) was careful to represent its author at the centre of another
the theatre’. 2 or ‘working dramatist’ 3 According to this theatrical model, the jobbing playwright eschews individuated literary authorship for commercial collaboration; he rejects printed publication for public performance; he recoils from self-presentation for self-concealment; and he sidesteps the goal of a literary career, artistic fame, for enigmatic anonymity
From its Nobel laureates to its literary festivals, modern-day Dublin lives up to its role as a literary capital. The question of whether Ireland experienced a cultural and literary Renaissance has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. This book extends the discussion by engaging with the specific literary culture of its capital city. It begins with an argument for the internationalised literary culture of late medieval Dublin by an analysis of James Yonge's 'Memoriale'. The citizens of Dublin engaged with and actively read texts imported from London, as Dublin's own printing was limited. The book presents case studies that establish Dublin as an emerging city of Renaissance literature by focusing on Edmund Spenser's political and social connections and by examining the literature of complaint emanating from late Elizabethan Dublin. It analyses the constructed authorial personae of Richard Bellings, James Shirley and Henry Burnell residing in Dublin, and discusses the concepts of literary friendship. Sir James Ware's scholarly achievements are analysed and his extensive intellectual community are investigated, revealing an open-minded Dublin community. In addition to being a representative Renaissance activity, translation was harnessed in the country as an 'instrument of state', as shown by translations of Gaelic poetry. The Renaissance literary production in Dublin had a multi-linguistic character with Latin orations taking place in the Trinity College Dublin. The book also addresses the question of whether the English-language drama composed and staged in Restoration Dublin is most accurately described as Anglo-Irish drama or 'English drama written in Ireland'.
virtue of humilitas , arrogance frequently operates poetologically as well, that is, arrogance negotiates anxieties about (new models of) literary authorship. In this chapter, I trace the poetological and literary-historical dimension of arrogance in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s treatments of the story of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida. Both authors, I argue, utilize arrogance in their Troy stories to
Shankar Raman’s essay argues that the very idea of creative invention—so central to modern assumptions about literary authorship—is embedded in philosophical and mathematical ideas and practices of making. By focusing on the “matter” of key geometrical texts, from Euclid to Descartes, Shankar Raman finds evidence of a radical change in the imagined purpose of geometric training, which he relates to new ways of thinking about poetic production. The descriptions and non-linguistic representations of algebraic and geometric problems found in Descartes’ project becomes analogous, in ways Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry seems almost to anticipate, to the poet’s struggle to make rather than to imitate.
by early modern women. Modernised editions are not only easier for students and beginning scholars to use, encouraging close reading and comparisons with other well-known examples of early modern poetry; they also undoubtedly carry with them the whiff of canonicity, of ‘great literary authorship’, and engender more serious approaches to the work.1 We have, therefore, aimed in this anthology to treat the selected women’s poems according to the broad editorial principles behind anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Our texts are modernised
’s staging of the homologies between acting and action can be viewed as a refusal either to obey or reject sovereignty, whether of the self or state, and so as a veritably ‘decisive indecisiveness’. 49 The whole of Shakespearean theatre thus becomes, in this Hebraicizing thinking, a dismantling of literary authorship or rendering of sovereign selfhood inoperative
create dramatic tension and to problematise the question of literary authorship that necessarily affects a play that relies so intensively on intertextuality. Paternity, as a paradigm of the unknowable, thus becomes both a thematic crucible and as a structuring principle of the play. Notes W. Shakespeare, Hamlet I, iv, ll 672. Ibid., I, ii, ll 266–9. Ibid., I, ii, 333. Ibid., I, ii, 361. Ibid., p. 103. This idea is forcefully expressed in Barker’s play Knowledge and a Girl (2003), where Snow White, unlike the queen, is unable to become pregnant. 6 Broadcast in 1971
of print. For even as the notion of Shakespeare as mystic monarchist wanes, critics are busy replacing it with a new version of the sovereign author. Thus, in Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship , Patrick Cheney asserts that by juxtaposing printing and playing in the magus’s grand renunciation, the dramatist highlights his own singularity as ‘the consummate “man of the theatre
thus not only combines poetry and drama but also orchestrates the collision of two opposing models of literary authorship, Chaucerian self-effacement and Spenserian self-crowning. Shakespeare’s concealed bid for literary fame in poet-playwright figures, however, finds a precursor in Chaucerian authorship. Keller suggests parallel versions of ‘counter-authorship’, ranging from the narratorial