Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays
David Schalkwyk offers a sustained reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to his plays. He argues that the la nguage of the sonnets is primarily performative rather than descriptive. In a wide-ranging analysis of both the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's sonnets and the Petrarchan discourses in a selection of plays, Schalkwyk addresses such issues as embodiment and silencing, interiority and theatricality, inequalities of power, status, gender and desire, both in the published poems and on the stage and in the context of the early modern period.
The Invention of Suspicion Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At precisely the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more 'probable'.
War and nation in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries
This original study explores a vital aspect of early-modern cultural history: the way that warfare is represented in the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
The book contrasts the Tudor and Stuart prose that called for the establishment of a standing army in the name of nation, discipline and subjectivity and the drama of the period that invited critique of this imperative. Barker examines contemporary dramatic texts both for their radical position on war and, in the case of the later drama, for their subversive commentary on an emerging idealisation of Shakespeare and his work.
We need a poetic history of the ocean, and Shakespeare can help us find one. There's more real salt in the plays than we might expect. Shakespeare's dramatic ocean spans the God-sea of the ancient world and the immense blue vistas that early modern mariners navigated. Throughout his career, from the opening shipwrecks of The Comedy of Errors through The Tempest, Shakespeare's plays figure the ocean as shocking physical reality and mind-twisting symbol of change and instability.
Shakespeare has made the big time. No less than the Beatles or Liberace, Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger, Shakespeare is big-time in the idiomatic sense of cultural success and widespread notoriety. Not only has he achieved canonical status, Shakespeare is a contemporary celebrity. His artistic distinction and aptitude for contro
