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Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, theologians, and humanist critics turned to tragedy to understand providence and agencies human and divine in the crucible of the Reformation. Rejecting familiar assumptions about tragedy, vital figures like Philipp Melanchthon, David Pareus, Lodovico Castelvetro, John Rainolds, and Daniel Heinsius developed distinctly philosophical ideas of tragedy, irreducible to drama or performance, inextricable from rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphysics. In its proximity to philosophy, tragedy afforded careful readers crucial insight into causality, probability, necessity, and the terms of human affect a...
Discusses the ways in which post-Reformation devotional practices informed expressions of desire in the poetry of five Renaissance English writers: Shakespeare, Donne, Greville, Herrick, and Milton.
In Drama and the Death of God, John Parker argues that the secularity often associated with Shakespeare inspired a variety of performances going back to antiquity. Scripture presupposes, even needs, the existence of a worldly sphere inimical to faith: known as the saeculum, this finite domain of appetite and unbelief invited both condemnation and celebration throughout medieval Christendom, as exemplified by the songs and plays of the Carmina Burana. After the tenth century, Christians routinely impersonated unbelievers in music dramas connected to the high holidays so that they might question biblical truths, especially the authenticity of miracles. The church generated by this means a vision of the godless world that modernity stepped into. After the English Reformation, when Europe's first commercial theaters arose on ruined monastic estates, players continued to showcase how divine intervention could be staged by humans in the absence of God. King Lear in particular explores the ancient proposition that the saeculum holds no inherent meaning and is capable of generating only pseudomiraculous spectacles to salve the ache of existence.
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How did ideas about the poet???s art surface in early modern texts? By looking into the intersections between poetry, poetics and other discourses ??? logic, rhetoric, natural philosophy, medicine, mythography or religion ??? the essays in this volume unearth notions that remained largely unwritten in the official literary criticism of the period. Focusing on questions of poetry???s origins and style, and exploring individual responses to issues of authenticity, career design, difficulty, or inspiration, this collection revisits and renews the critical lexicons that connect poetic theory and practice in early modern English texts and their European contexts. Reading canonical poets and critics ??? Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Puttenham, Dryden ??? alongside less studied figures such as Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Thomas Lodge, Aemilia Lanyer, Fulke Greville or George Chapman, this book extends the coordinates for a dialogue between literary practice and the Renaissance theories from which they stemmed and which they helped to outgrow.
Humanism, English Literature, and the Translation of Greek, 1430–1560 is the first study to trace the influence of the Quattrocento rebirth of Greek scholarship on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English literature. It begins with the first signs of humanist Greek in England in and around Duke Humfrey's circle, at a time when no English writer could claim significant Greek literacy. It ends on the cusp of Elizabethan literary culture, when English writers much more frequently translated Ancient Greek into both Latin and the vernacular. This period witnessed a surge in the translation of Greek. It also witnessed changing beliefs about how and why Greek should be translated at all, especial...
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This collection of essays explores how the Shakespearean drama enacts ancient virtues and conceptualises new ones in complex fictional scenarios that test virtues for their continuing value. Contributors approach the virtues as a source of imaginative, affective and intellectual nourishment and consider how Shakespeare's art increases our capacity for new pursuits of the good. Examining Shakespeare's virtuous theatre in tragic, comic and romance modes and from ethical, theatrical and political perspectives, this volume establishes virtue as a framework for a socially, environmentally and spiritually renewed literary criticism. Contributors balance historical depth and philosophical insight with the art of close reading as they contemplate the dynamic field of virtue - embodied, responsive, energetic and dynamic - as it ebbs and flows across time, among multiple wisdom traditions, and in the entangled lives and troubled circumstances of Shakespeare's characters.