Shakespeare observed

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Jean Wilson

"The plays of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and Shakespeare's work in particular, are usually presented in a purely literary context; the material context is relatively neglected. Yet the setting, staging and costuming of Shakespeare's plays are not only fascinating subjects in their own right; they also illuminate aspects both of the playtext and of contemporary social and cultural history." "The Archeology of Shakespeare sets out to right this imbalance in theatre studies by systematically investigating the material evidence that bears upon the theatre and theatrical presentations of Shakespeare's day. The astounding discovery in 1989 of the foundations of the Rose theatre, followed later in the year by the uncovering of the site of Shakespeare's own Globe theatre, have transformed our knowledge of the subject. Dr. Wilson assesses the results of these investigations in relation to what is known of the other theatres of London, and supplements her findings by the study of contemporary art forms, especially tomb sculpture, an under-used body of material that throws considerable light on the interiors and staging practices of Elizabethan playhouses." "Chapters on the social and cultural background to the Elizabethan theatre, as well as on Shakespeare himself, provide the context to the fascinating detail of the 'archeology'. Nearly ninety illustrations of contemporary paintings, sculptures and buildings complement the text."--BOOK JACKET.

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Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

This is the first study of puritan women's place in early modern intellectual culture. Puritan women have suffered a double prejudice: that women were excluded from male culture, and that puritanism was hostile to many forms of culture. This collection argues that early modern women's puritanism formed and developed rather than prohibited their substantial and leading contributions to their culture. The essays introduce recently discovered writers such as Elizabeth Isham and Elizabeth Melville and new analyses of well-known writers such as Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Locke, and also highlight the local, national, and international dimensions of early modern puritan culture. With a foreword by N. H. Keeble and afterword by David Norbrook and fifteen essays by leading scholars of early modern literature and history, this collection reveals an intellectual culture characterized by networks of patronage, translation, manuscript circulation and correspondence. - Publisher.

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Paul Fussell

In this classic work, Paul Fussell illuminates the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, focusing primarily on the literary means by which The Great War has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized. Drawing on the work of important wartime poets such as David Jones and Wilfred Owen, on the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden, and on numerous other personal records housed in the Imperial War Museum, this award-winning volume provides an intimate and intensely poetic account of the event that revolutionized the way we see the world. It has been hailed as "humanly wise and compassionate" (Saturday Review), "original and brilliant" (Lionel Trilling), "bright and sensitive" (The New Yorker), and "probing, sympathetic, and illuminating" (The New Republic). It is an undisputed classic of cultural criticism. (from Amazon)

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Marco Mincoff

After centuries of denigration, Shakespeare's romances, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, came to be seen by many critics as among Shakespeare's most profound works - as extensions of his tragic vision, as experiments in dramatic form, as deeply significant statements about art, about nature, about life. Marco Mincoff's Things Supernatural and Causeless - a work published in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1987, just before his death, but clearly written in the mid-1970s - sets out to show why this evaluation of the romances is wrong and to propose another way of looking at and evaluating Pericles and the plays that followed it. For Mincoff, romance is "an inherently inferior genre" that, no matter what dramatic skills Shakespeare lavished on it, could never yield great drama. He argues that none of the romances has a profound message: whatever meaning one finds in Pericles, for instance, can be found just as readily in Apollonius of Tyre.^ Thus to look to these plays for greatness or for profound themes or ideas is to be inevitably disappointed or self-deluded. What one does find in the romances, though, are plays that diverge sharply from their sources and analogues, and from other drama of the period, in the attention given to the creation of a sense of wonder. Mincoff finds, in the systematic control of language, crafting of scenes, and altering of sources in the plays, the suggestion of supernatural influence upon the play's action that exploits the "wonderful" inherent in Heliodorian romance. Mincoff suspects that "this sense of wonder really was important to Shakespeare," and finds Lafew's words (in All's Well That Ends Well) both a rather bitter commentary on Jacobean society and a clue to our better understanding of the romances:. "They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.^ Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear." Mincoff can spot that which is truly unusual in the romances because of his extensive knowledge of the other drama and other literature of the period and because of his ability to place the plays within the context of their own time. He places the above quotation, for example, within contemporary responses to skepticism; he discusses such dramaturgical devices as Presenters and expository supernumeraries in the context of other plays that Shakespeare's audiences would have been seeing; he is alert to the differences between our present-day understanding of life and language and that of Shakespeare's age, showing how words like art and nature are today understood in postromantic terms that make them far different words, representing far different concepts, from those used by Shakespeare in his romances.