Shakespeare’s Golden Ages : : Resisting Nostalgia in Elizabethan Drama / / Kristine Johanson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: Johanson, Kristine,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture : ECSRC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)

Examines dramatic acts of nostalgia as rhetorical moves designed to precipitate future actionOffers sophisticated readings of literary, religious, and political texts alongside Shakespeare's works to show how he develops his own use of nostalgia and how that use influences his contemporariesProposes new interpretations of how the history plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (e.g. The Queen’s Men, Marlowe) influenced his own dramaProvides case studies offering new, revelatory readings of 2 Henry VI, Richard II, Julius Caesar as well as discussions of Henry V, King John and moreSuggests new ways to analyse and comprehend the structure of desire that is nostalgiaDiverging from critical paths that have focused on nostalgia as a memorializing practice or on Stuart nostalgia for Elizabeth, this book argues that Shakespeare’s Elizabethan history plays stage nostalgia as a future-focused political rhetoric. In doing so, the book suggests new directions for studying nostalgia. Case studies including Richard II and Julius Caesar demonstrate how Shakespeare creates a dramatic argument for nostalgia’s power and possibility, even as he represents the fruitlessness of trying to reclaim the past and the fiction of that past's ideal nature. In his dramaturgy, nostalgia functions as a persuasive call for (short-lived) political change. The book provides new interpretations of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to illustrate how his use of nostalgia depends on, innovates from and influences his fellow playwrights. By reading literary, religious and political texts alongside Shakespeare's histories, this book attends additionally to the extra-dramatic valences nostalgic rhetoric obtains in Elizabethan England.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Series Editors’ Preface -- Prologue -- Note on Citation -- Introduction: Rethinking Nostalgia -- Chapter 1 Against Nostalgia: Looking Forward to the Future in the Queen’s Men’s Plays and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine -- Chapter 2 What Merry World in England? Nostalgic Paroemia and The Second Part of Henry VI -- Chapter 3 In the Mean Season: Richard II’s Absent Hospitality -- Chapter 4 The Lessons of Nostalgia in Julius Caesar and Sejanus -- Conclusion: Resisting Nostalgia -- Bibliography -- Index