Shakespeare's History Plays: Rethinking Historicism

ISBN-13: 9780748646135 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 256 str.

Parvini, Neema

Opis

Boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approaches. This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. The book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical readings of his plays.

Spis treści

Contents; Acknowledgements; A Note on Texts; 1. Introduction; 2. New Historicism; James I and the Politics of Literature; 'Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne'; 3. Cultural Materialism; 'History and Ideology, Masculinity and Miscegenation: The Instance of Henry V'; Marginal Politics?; 4. An Argument Against Anti-Humanism; Nature and Nurture; Three Types of Determinism; Freedom versus Determinism and Human Agency; 5. Solutions; 6. Shakespeare's Historical and Political Thought in Context; Sixteenth-century Historiography; Three Strains of Historiography; Shakespeare's Humanist Historiography; 7. Personal Action and Agency in Henry VI; Personal Politics: 2 Henry VI; Class Politics: Cade's Rebellion; Power Politics: 3 Henry VI; 8 Ideology in Richard II and Henry IV; Cultural Historicism and the Second Tetralogy; Richard II: 'Such is the breath of kings' (1.3.208); Henry IV: 'God save the King! Will no man say "Amen"?'; Falstaff; 9. Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.