How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage
Power and Succession in the History Plays
1. Auflage
Erschienen am 28. Januar 2017
696 Seiten
978-0-300-22566-2 (ISBN)
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Beschreibung
A masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare's plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan England With an ageing, childless monarch, lingering divisions due to the Reformation, and the threat of foreign enemies, Shakespeare's England was fraught with unparalleled anxiety and complicated problems. In this monumental work, Peter Lake reveals, more than any previous critic, the extent to which Shakespeare's plays speak to the depth and sophistication of Elizabethan political culture and the Elizabethan imagination. Lake reveals the complex ways in which Shakespeare's major plays engaged with the events of his day, particularly regarding the uncertain royal succession, theological and doctrinal debates, and virtue and virtu in politics. Through his plays, Lake demonstrates, Shakespeare was boldly in conversation with his audience about a range of contemporary issues. This remarkable literary and historical analysis pulls the curtain back on what Shakespeare was really telling his audience and what his plays tell us today about the times in which they were written.
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Inhalt
- Cover page
- Halftitle page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and acknowledgements
- PART I Contexts and structures
- Back to the future: Catholics and protestants learn the lessons of history
- Putting the (high) politics back into 'power'
- Elizabethan political history, now
- The arts of history
- Putting history on the stage
- History and the 'now' of performance
- Getting the audience to do the work
- Plays and pamphlets, pamphlets and plays
- PART II Past into present and future: 2 and 3 Henry VI and the politics of lost legitimacy
- CHAPTER 1 Losing legitimacy: monarchical weakness andthe descent into disorder
- The politics of faction anatomised
- The 'good duke' (of Gloucester)
- Good counsellor/evil counsellor
- True tragedy: the fall of Gloucester
- Monarchical rule as the enabling condition of good counsel
- CHAPTER 2 Disorder dissected (i): the inversion of the gender order
- Disorderly wives and witches
- Women on top: the resistible rise of Queen Margaret
- The 'Amazonian trull'
- Not clerical but lay: the cross-dressing Henry VI
- Beyond evil counsel: the Christian prince as oxymoron
- CHAPTER 3 Disorder dissected (ii): the inversion of the social order
- 'We are in order when we are most out of order'
- Puritan popularity personified
- A mirror for (dysfunctional) magistrates?
- CHAPTER 4 Hereditary 'right' and political legitimacy anatomised
- The right to rule unravelled
- A monarchical republic (not)
- When honour becomes revenge
- From Lancaster to Tudor
- PART III Happy endings and alternative outcomes: 1 Henry VI and Richard III
- CHAPTER 5 How not to go there: 1 Henry VI as prequel and alternative ending
- Faction politics
- Succession politics
- The politics of virtue
- Honour and its enemies: women on top - again
- Anti-popery
- Divided we fall: the politics of faction in time of war
- CHAPTER 6 Richard III: political ends, providential means
- The making of a Machiavel
- Monstrous bodies and providential signs
- Signs and prophecies
- The audience as 'high all- seer'
- Ambiguities of 'evil counsel'
- From providence to predestination: the return of legitimacy
- Richard III as a guide to the past, present and future
- CHAPTER 7 Going Roman: Richard III and Titus Andronicus compared
- PART IV How (not) to depose a tyrant: King John and Richard II
- CHAPTER 8 The Elizabethan resonances of the reign of King John
- Catholic and protestant appropriations of King John
- The Holinshed account
- CHAPTER 9 The first time as polemic, the second time as play: Shakespeare's King John and The troublesome reign
- Legitimacy problematised
- The bastard
- Commodity
- Popery in The troublesome reign
- Popery and the descent into tyranny in King John
- The apotheosis of the bastard
- England and providence
- CHAPTER 10 Richard II, or the rights and wrongs of resistance
- Tyranny anatomised
- Tyranny outed
- The fallacies of sacred kingship
- From the reformation of the kingdom to rebellion, usurpation and regicide
- The political theatre of usurpation and the paradoxes of loyalism
- Prophecy or prognostication?
- Beyond evil counsel
- CHAPTER 11 Shakespeare and Parsons - again
- (Not) a parliament scene
- The dynastic consequences of the politics of prophecy
- A politique politics?
- The bastard and Bolingbroke compared
- Part V The Essexian circle squared, or a user's guide to the politics of popularity, honour and legitimacy
- CHAPTER 12 The loss of legitimacy and the politics of commodity dissected
- Usurpation and its consequences
- The public politics of insurrection
- Rebellion from the inside out
- Honour
- The politics of commodity and the language of the market
- Lancastrians and Tudors
- The politics of memory
- The politics of religion and prophecy
- CHAPTER 13 Learning to be a bastard: Hal's second (plebeian) nature
- The pleasures and perils of 'popularity'
- CHAPTER 14 Festive Falstaff: of popularity, puritans and princes
- Antipuritanism - again
- Misrule stops being festive
- Legitimising the bastard: Hal becomes Henry
- CHAPTER 15 Henry V and the fruits of legitimacy
- Back to 'normal'?
- Legitimacy as an achieved effect
- A just war and a Christian prince?
- Perils of popularity tamed and enticements of honour resisted
- A Machiavel for good: can even the best of princes get to heaven?
- Peace, war and the politics of the succession
- Essex - again
- PART VI Using plays to read plays: the court politics of the dramatic riposte
- CHAPTER 16 Contemporary readings: Oldcastle/Falstaff, Cobham/Essex
- Oldcastle/Falstaff, Cobham/Essex
- Getting him coming and going (i): The merry wives of Windsor
- Getting him going and coming (ii): Falstaff/Oldcastle as Cobham
- Shaming rituals and court masques
- A happy ending
- Political contingencies
- CHAPTER 17 Oldcastle redivivus
- A clerical Falstaff
- A clerical conspiracy
- Episcopal tyranny
- Oldcastle as the epitome of perfect protestant loyalty
- Getting it right
- Getting it wrong
- Loyal Lollards and moderate puritans
- The godly and their episcopal enemies
- Essex - again
- PART VII Julius Caesar: the dangers of playingp agan and republican politics in a Christian monarchy
- CHAPTER 18 The state we're in
- CHAPTER 19 The politics of honour (in a popular state)
- Republican honour
- Emulation and the production and maintenance of republican virtue
- CHAPTER 20 Performing honour and the politics of popularity (in a popular state)
- The politics of honour and the people
- CHAPTER 21 The politics of popularity and faction (in a popular state)
- Learning to tell the time: universalising scepticism versus historicising relativism
- CHAPTER 22 The politics of prodigy, prophecy and providence (in a pagan state)
- CHAPTER 23 Between Henry V and Hamlet
- PART VIII Disillusion: Christian and pagan style
- CHAPTER 24 Hamlet
- Essex - again
- The purpose of playing
- CHAPTER 25 The morning after the night before: Troilus and Cressida as retrospect
- 'Fluellenism' revisited
- Market value
- The case for war (and peace)
- Faction and fraction
- The politics of fame and the decay of honour
- Bad Essex/good Essex
- 'War for a placket': the paradoxes of female rule - again
- Conclusion
- The history play and the post- reformation public sphere
- Plays and politics
- Prudence and providence
- 'Religion' into 'politics' doesn't go
- Notes
- Index
