The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson PDF Download

Author: Mary Ellen Lamb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134441118
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
By analyzing appropriations of fairies, old wives, and mummers, this project explores the conflicted entanglements of early moderns leaving, or attempting to leave, a once-shared common culture behind.

Author: Mary Ellen Lamb
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113444110X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Breaking new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below, this book draws on theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier and John Fiske to synthesize work from disparate fields and present new readings of well-known literary works. Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb investigates the social narratives of several social groups – an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. She states that under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social fractions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves from each other – particularly from lower status groups. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, she explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.

Author: Natália Pikli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000431614
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which the early modern hobby-horse featured in different productions of popular culture between the 1580s and 1630s. Natália Pikli approaches this study with a thorough and interdisciplinary examination of hobby-horse references, with commentary on the polysemous uses of the word, offers an informative background to reconsider well-known texts by Shakespeare and others, and provides an overview on the workings of cultural memory regarding popular culture in early modern England. The book will appeal to those with interest in early modern drama and theatre, dramaturgy, popular culture, cultural memory, and iconography.

Author: Neil Rhodes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408143623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
While much has been written on Shakespeare's debt to the classical tradition, less has been said about his roots in the popular culture of his own time. This is the first book to explore the full range of his debts to Elizabethan popular culture. Topics covered include the mystery plays, festive custom, clowns, romance and popular fiction, folklore and superstition, everyday sayings, and popular songs. These essays show how Shakespeare, throughout his dramatic work, used popular culture. A final chapter, which considers ballads with Shakespearean connections in the seventeenth century, shows how popular culture immediately after his time used Shakespeare.

Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351922009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
1978 witnessed the publication of Peter Burke's groundbreaking study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Now in its third edition this remarkable book has for thirty years set the benchmark for cultural historians with its wide ranging and imaginative exploration of early modern European popular culture. In order to celebrate this achievement, and to explore the ways in which perceptions of popular culture have changed in the intervening years a group of leading scholars are brought together in this new volume to examine Burke's thesis in relation to England. Adopting an appropriately interdisciplinary approach, the collection offers an unprecedented survey of the field of popular culture in early modern England as it currently stands, bringing together scholars at the forefront of developments in an expanding area. Taking as its starting point Burke's argument that popular culture was everyone's culture, distinguishing it from high culture, which only a restricted social group could access, it explores an intriguing variety of sources to discover whether this was in fact the case in early modern England. It further explores the meaning and significance of the term 'popular culture' when applied to the early modern period: how did people distinguish between high and low culture - could they in fact do so? Concluded by an Afterword by Peter Burke, the volume provides a vivid sense of the range and significance of early modern popular culture and the difficulties involved in defining and studying it.

Author: Margreta De Grazia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886325
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Twenty-one essays provide lively and authoritative approaches to the literary, historical, cultural and performative aspects of Shakespeare works.

Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 150151315X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare’s drama and Spenser’s allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero’s art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Complaints.

Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317042069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

Author: Douglas Bruster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134313713
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
This remarkable study shows how prologues ushered audience and actors through a rite of passage and how they can be seen to offer rich insight into what the early modern theatre was thought capable of achieving.

Author: Kinga Földváry
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443846457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
As suggested by the title Early Modern Communi(cati)ons, the volume demonstrates that the connections and common points of reference within early modern studies bind Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural studies and Shakespearean investigations together in an unexpected number of ways, and this diversity of ties has been used as the main theme around which the thirteen essays have been organised. While the first group of essays deals with early modern culture, presenting the socio-historical context necessary for any in-depth literary investigation, as exemplified through analyses of outstanding literary achievements from the period, the second part of the volume focuses on the oeuvre of the most famous representative of the age, William Shakespeare, with individual chapters creating a tangible continuum, moving from the cultural and literary context that informs his works, to their interpretation in present-day performances and their theoretical backgrounds. In the same way as the volume comprises writings on a diverse but still coherent range of topics, the authorial team is equally representative of diversity and continuity at the same time. The authors include several senior scholars working in the Hungarian academic community, representing all significant research centres in the field from all over the country. A number of essays have been contributed by promising young talents as well.