Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage write by Darryl Chalk. This book was released on 2019-06-17. Contagion and the Shakespearean Stage available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory. In a wide range of essays focused on early modern drama and the culture of theater, contributors explore how ideas of contagion not only inform representations of the senses (such as smell and touch) and emotions (such as disgust, pity, and shame) but also shape how people understood belief, narrative, and political agency. Epidemic thinking was not limited to medical inquiry or the narrow study of a particular disease. Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and other early modern writers understood that someone might be infected or transformed by the presence of others, through various kinds of exchange, or if exposed to certain ideas, practices, or environmental conditions. The discourse and concept of contagion provides a lens for understanding early modern theatrical performance, dramatic plots, and theater-going itself.
Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage
Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage write by Mary Floyd-Wilson. This book was released on 2013-07-11. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.
Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage
Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage write by Amy Kenny. This book was released on 2019-01-21. Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book explores how the humoral womb was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the Shakespearean stage by considering the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. Galenic naturalism applied the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—to delineate women as porous, polluting, and susceptible to their environment. This book draws on early modern medical texts to provocatively demonstrate how Shakespeare’s canon offers a unique agency to female characters via humoral discourse of the womb. Chapters discuss early modern medicine’s attempt to theorize and interpret the womb, specifically its role in disease, excretion, and conception, alongside passages of Shakespeare’s plays to offer a fresh reading of (geo)humoral subjectivity. The book shows how Shakespeare subversively challenges contemporary notions of female fluidity by accentuating the significance of the womb as a source of self-defiance and autonomy for female characters across his canon.
Shakespeare and Disgust
Shakespeare and Disgust - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Shakespeare and Disgust write by Bradley J. Irish. This book was released on 2023-02-09. Shakespeare and Disgust available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Drawing on both historical analysis and theories from the modern affective sciences, Shakespeare and Disgust argues that the experience of revulsion is one of Shakespeare's central dramatic concerns. Known as the 'gatekeeper emotion', disgust is the affective process through which humans protect the boundaries of their physical bodies from material contaminants and their social bodies from moral contaminants. Accordingly, the emotion provided Shakespeare with a master category of compositional tools – poetic images, thematic considerations and narrative possibilities – to interrogate the violation and preservation of such boundaries, whether in the form of compromised bodies, compromised moral actors or compromised social orders. Designed to offer both focused readings and birds-eye coverage, this volume alternates between chapters devoted to the sustained analysis of revulsion in specific plays (Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Othello and Hamlet) and chapters presenting a general overview of Shakespeare's engagement with certain kinds of prototypical disgust elicitors, including food, disease, bodily violation, race and sex disgust. Disgust, the book argues, is one of the central engines of human behaviour – and, somewhat surprisingly, it must be seen as a centrepiece of Shakespeare's affective universe.
Venus’s Palace
Venus’s Palace - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Venus’s Palace write by Reut Barzilai. This book was released on 2023-03-20. Venus’s Palace available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book lays bare the dialogue between Shakespeare and critics of the stage and positions it as part of an ongoing cultural, ethical, and psychological debate about the effects of performance on actors and on spectators. In so doing, the book makes a substantial contribution both to the study of representations of theatre in Shakespeare’s plays and to the understanding of ethical concerns about acting and spectating—then, and now. The book opens with a comprehensive and coherent analysis of the main early modern English anxieties about theater and its power. These are read against twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of acting, interviews with actors, and research into the effects of media representation on spectator behaviour, all of which demonstrate the lingering relevance of antitheatrical claims and the personal and philosophical implications of acting and spectating. The main part of the book reveals Shakespeare’s responses to major antitheatrical claims about the powerful effects of poetry, music, playacting, and playgoing. It also demonstrates the evolution of Shakespeare’s view of these claims over the course of his career: from light-hearted parody in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, through systematic contemplation in Hamlet, to acceptance and dramatization in The Tempest. This study will be of great interest to scholars and students of theater, English literature, history, and culture.
