Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser
Description
Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare's drama and Spenser's allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero's art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare's comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser's Faerie Queene and Complaints.
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Content
- Intro
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One. Body-Building: The Besieged Castle in Books I and II of The Faerie Queene
- Chapter Two. Castles in the Air: The Figurative Frame of Mind in Shakespeare's Second Henriad
- Chapter Three. Under Lock and Key: The Body as a House in Book III of The Faerie Queene
- Chapter Four. Ruined Cities and Dividing Walls: Spenser's Ruines of Rome, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus
- Chapter Five. The Passionate Body as a Built Environment: Books IV-V of The Faerie Queene and Antony and Cleopatra
- Chapter Six. The Architectural Place of the Mind: Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index
