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Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare's Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Maimed Rights in Shakespeare's England.- 2. Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in Medieval Arthurian Romance and Richard II.- 3. Demonizing the Other: "The Prioress's Tale," The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice.- 4. Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Hamlet.- 5. Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Virgin Martyr.- 6. "Remember the Porter": Memorializing the Medieval Drama and the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth.- 7. Conclusion: Shakespeare "Our Contemporary".
About the author
Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, and is the author of ten books, including a Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007); Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan 2014); and Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).
Summary
Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present,
Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s
Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and
The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.
Additional text
“This … is a timely book. It is also highly readable and easy to recommend: it is never less than stimulating, its parallels between medieval and later texts often illuminating and thought provoking.” (Ivana Djordjević, Speculum, Vol. 94 (4), October, 2019)
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"This ... is a timely book. It is also highly readable and easy to recommend: it is never less than stimulating, its parallels between medieval and later texts often illuminating and thought provoking." (Ivana Djordjevic , Speculum, Vol. 94 (4), October, 2019)
