Product Description: This book assesses William Shakespeare in the context of political and religious crisis, paying particular attention to his Catholic connections, which have heretofore been underplayed by much Protestant interpretation. Bourgeois Richmond's most important contribution is to study the genre of romance in its guise as a 'cover' for recusant Catholicism, drawing on a long tradition of medieval-religious plays devoted to the propagation of Catholic religious faith...read more

Product Description: Comparison of Shakespeare's works to their likely sources is one way to deepen our appreciation. Sources for The Tempest, however, have long eluded the grasp of scholars, who have unearthed only bits and pieces that resemble minor elements of the play...read more

Product Description: The hundreds of biblical references in Shakespeare's plays give ample evidence that he was well acquainted with Scripture. Not only is the range of his biblical references impressive, but also the aptness with which he makes them...read more

Product Description: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible...read more

Product Description: In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe wrote a profoundly religious drama despite the theater's newfound secularism and his own reputation for anti-Christian irreverence. The Aesthetics of Antichrist explores this apparent paradox by suggesting that, long before Marlowe, Christian drama and ritual performance had reveled in staging the collapse of Christianity into its historical opponents―paganism, Judaism, worldliness, heresy...read more

Product Description: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work...read more

Product Description: Building on current scholarly interest in the religious dimensions of the play, this study shows how Shakespeare uses Hamlet to comment on the Calvinistic Protestantism predominant around 1600. By considering the play's inner workings against the religious ideas of its time, John Curran explores how Shakespeare portrays in this work a completely deterministic universe in the Calvinist mode, and, Curran argues, exposes the disturbing aspects of Calvinism...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness complicates debates about whether Shakespeare's plays are fundamentally Protestant or Catholic in sympathy, challenging analyses that either find Protestant elements consistently undercutting Catholic motifs or, less often, discover evidence of the playwright's endorsement of Catholic doctrine and customs...read more

Product Description: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work...read more

The question of Shakespeare's Catholic contexts has occupied many scholars in recent years, and their growing body of work has been enriched by revisionist accounts of the Reformation society and culture in which he lived and worked. This innovative book brings together sixteen original essays by leading scholars who examine Shakespeare's works in light of this new scholarship: their goal is to explore a possible interpretive consensus from Protestant, Catholic, and secular perspectives. Offering stimulating new approaches to traditional problems in Shakespeare studies, the essays provide a fully developed picture of Shakespeare's relation to the Reformation-in the light of newly unearthed religious contexts. From the monastic life in Measure for Measure to Puritanism in Hamlet , the essays offer fresh understandings of such themes as majority cultures, national self-definition, hidden trauma, and concealed identity. The contributors: Dennis Taylor, Richard Dutton, Katharine Goodland, Clare Asquith, Jean-Christophe Mayer, Timothy Rosendale, Gary D. Hamilton, Regina M. Buccola, John Klause, John Freeman, R. Chris Hassel Jr., Jennifer Rust, David Beauregard, Maurice Hunt, Lisa Hopkins, Richard Mallette, and Paula McQuade. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In a study of Shakespeare's frequent use of trials or other scenes conveying judgment, Bernthal shows how paying careful attention to the Elizabethan religious and legal context in which Shakespeare lived illuminates many of his most famous works. Advertising. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The work includes scholarly writers interested in a Christian perspective on selected comedies and the four late romances, and each writer shows tremendous insight on the claims made by the representations of Christianity of the Renaissance era as well as the dramatist's response to those claims...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The human soul is for pre-modern philosophers the cause of both thinking and life. This double aspect of the soul, which makes man a rational animal, expresses itself above all in human action. Deadly Thought: "Hamlet" and the Human Soul traces Hamlet's famous inability to act to his inability to hold together these twin aspects of the soul...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This is an historical study of the four Shakespearean late plays: "Pericles", "Cymbeline", "Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest". The introduction argues for a correct application of historicism in the fields of literary criticism. As a preliminary to discussion of the romances, it then considers the state of religion in England in the wake of the so-called "Elizabeth settlements"; the possibilities for religious expression in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and - still with particular regard to religious topics - the relationship of the romances to their sources...read more

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Product Description: Investigating the litarary and cultural history and significance of the holy fool, Sandra Pyle analysizes seven of Shakespeare's plays in order to discover how he adapted what was a generic (medieval) character type. Pyle then theorizes that the holy fool's mission in Shakespeare's plays is to promote harmony and good will by correcting those personality flaws that impede human community...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The local tradition in Stratford is that Shakespeare "died a Papist," having sent for a Catholic priest to give him the last rites. It is clear from his plays that he was against the strictures of Puritanism, but in The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, Professor Peter Milward argues that the whole of Shakespeare's work reveals a common thread of sympathy with the plight of the suffering persecuted Catholics under Queen Elizabeth and King James I...read more