1,720,960 research outputs found
The Possible Worlds of Shakespearean Drama
No full textThis study addresses the role of the possible or virtual in Shakespearean drama. It argues that the possible component constitutes an integral part of Shakespearean drama, and that they are as important as the actual events or component. To underscore its paramount importance, the study stresses two aspects of the possible in Shakespearean drama: its potentiality and its cognitive function. Potentiality highlights the power of the virtual in opening up different meanings and interpretations, suggesting alternative possibilities and creating new storylines out of the original ones. The cognitive function of the virtual or possible underlines its role in rendering the actual events and happenings more intelligible, probable and comprehensible. The study builds on the theoretical framework of possible worlds theory as well as Classical and Renaissance rhetoric; it argues that Shakespeare’s familiarity with and employment of these notions can be attributed to his rhetorical training, which formed an essential part of Elizabethan education.
The study deals with the drama both as a fictional story and as theatre. On the level of theatre, it demonstrates that, despite its materiality, theatre must stimulate an imaginary virtual reality if the physical events and happenings onstage are to be fully meaningful. On the level of the fictional story, it shows that virtual or possible events form the beliefs and intentions of characters. They help to set the conflict on track and help the audience to access the characters’ inwardness. Although the possible is thought of as an ontological category, the study highlights its cognitive dimension, and argues that features of the possible even shape our image of the actual past. It addresses this question in relation to the representation of history in Shakespeare’s history plays. Finally, it deals with counterfactual statements in Shakespeare and uses a multidisciplinary approach to study their significance.Embassy of the Republic of Ira
The Folly of the Machiavel: Christopher Marlowe's Mortimer and the Guise
No full textThis is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the link in this record.Les réponses à Machiavel dans l’Angleterre du xvie siècle tardif, dont plusieurs médiatisées par la France, étaient souvent tissées avec un discours de folie assorti de tropes dramatiques. Ce phénomène éclaire la représentation ambivalente par Christopher Marlowe des arts « machiavéliques » de la duplicité et de la violence tactique dans Edward II (1592 ?) et The Massacre at Paris (1592-1593 ?). Tandis que les deux pièces peuvent être lues selon une structure morale Tudor traditionnelle, dans laquelle des pratiques méchantes découlent de la frivolité ludique et sont finalement châtiées, on peut également défendre l’hypothèse selon laquelle elles endossent la célébration méprisante d’astutia visible dans certaines traductions manuscrites du Prince, où les régents honnêtes sont qualifiés de « poor fools [pauvres dupes
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Thomas May, Lucan's <i>Pharsalia </i>(1627)
No full textLauded after his death as ‘champion of the English Commonwealth’, but also derided as a ‘most servile wit, and mercenary pen’, the poet, dramatist and historian Thomas May (c.1595–1650) produced the first full translation into English of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile shortly before a ruinous civil war engulfed his own country. Lucan, whose epic had lamented the Roman Republic’s doomed struggle to preserve liberty and inevitable enslavement to the Caesars, and who was forced to commit suicide at the behest of the emperor Nero, was a figure of fascination in early modern Europe. May’s accomplished rendition of his challenging poem marked an important moment in the history of its English reception.This is a modernized edition of the first complete (1627) edition of the translation. It includes prefatory materials, dedications and May’s own historical notes on the text. Besides an introduction contextualising May’s life and work and the key features of his translation, it offers a full commentary to the text highlighting how May responded to contemporary editions and commentaries on Lucan, and explaining points of literary, political, philosophical interest. There is also a detailed glossary and bibliography, and a set of textual notes enumerating the chief differences between the 1627 edition and the others produced in May’s lifetime. This volume aims not just to provide an accessible path into the dense, sometimes provocative poem May shapes from Lucan, but also a broader appreciation of the translator’s literary merits and the role his work plays in the history of the English reception of Roman literature and culture
Thomas May, Lucan's <i>Pharsalia </i>(1627)
No full textLauded after his death as ‘champion of the English Commonwealth’, but also derided as a ‘most servile wit, and mercenary pen’, the poet, dramatist and historian Thomas May (c.1595–1650) produced the first full translation into English of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile shortly before a ruinous civil war engulfed his own country. Lucan, whose epic had lamented the Roman Republic’s doomed struggle to preserve liberty and inevitable enslavement to the Caesars, and who was forced to commit suicide at the behest of the emperor Nero, was a figure of fascination in early modern Europe. May’s accomplished rendition of his challenging poem marked an important moment in the history of its English reception.This is a modernized edition of the first complete (1627) edition of the translation. It includes prefatory materials, dedications and May’s own historical notes on the text. Besides an introduction contextualising May’s life and work and the key features of his translation, it offers a full commentary to the text highlighting how May responded to contemporary editions and commentaries on Lucan, and explaining points of literary, political, philosophical interest. There is also a detailed glossary and bibliography, and a set of textual notes enumerating the chief differences between the 1627 edition and the others produced in May’s lifetime. This volume aims not just to provide an accessible path into the dense, sometimes provocative poem May shapes from Lucan, but also a broader appreciation of the translator’s literary merits and the role his work plays in the history of the English reception of Roman literature and culture
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Sexual and political liberty and neo-Latin poetics: the Heroides of Mark Alexander Boyd
No full textThis is a post-print version. The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.comThis article examines responses to the
Heroides
by the Scottish neo-Latin poet Mark
Alexander Boyd, composed whilst in ‘exile’ in France during the 1580s and early
1590s. Boyd’s engagements reflect the priorities of contemporary humanist interpretations
of the
Heroides
, on the one hand positioning Ovid’s poems as models for
elegant Latin verse composition, and on the other reading them as guides to female
sexual (mis)conduct. Such an approach tended to reinforce Renaissance prejudices
about sex and gender, as Boyd’s efforts amply reveal. Yet the exorbitance of female
love elegy also permitted a limited critique of such norms, and this is demonstrated
in Boyd’s second set of responses, the
Heroides et Hymni
(1592), which suggestively
collocate his personal political difficulties with women’s sexual freedom
Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Contradictions of Sovereignty
Full text linkThis essay argues that Marlowe's portrait of monarchy in Dido, Queene of Carthage both invites but ultimately defeats an attempt to read it directly through contemporary ideological contexts. While the play was written at a time of heightened debate surrounding the powers of princes, to which Dido herself gestures in a climactic moment of the action, the chief components of its idea of monarchy are rather the erotics of the gaze and a fantasy of self-sovereignty and illimitable autonomy. The former depends on, and probably derives from, the interaction between charismatic performers and an attentive audience within a playhouse, with the play both presuming and requiring that the boy-actor playing Aeneas is especially 'lovely' to look at, and blonde. The latter, contrastingly, possibly reflects an emerging discourse of political and especially monarchical sovereignty in the period, particularly in the wake of Jean Bodin's influential Six Livres de la République (1576), but translates the ideological into the personal and psychological in such a way as to defuse much of its political content or applicability. The collapse of the play's model of eroticised sovereign self-hood is highly traumatic, suggesting that it is rather a deeply invested fantasy than an attempt at subversion. Though highly distinctive, the play's understanding of monarchy occurs in many other works traditionally attributed to Marlowe and suggests his artistic influence on their composition, even if the extent to which he wrote the actual words, in the texts' final published form, can be disputed
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