The English Koranic Images in Some Literary Writings

The Qur’ān translations into English appeared first in 1649. This English translation entitled the Arabic Qur’ān as the Koran and ambiguously represented most of the authentic Islamic teachings. Some misinformation is directed against the Prophet and the divinity of the Qur’ān. In modern English literature, the reader encounters an increasing diversity of references to the English Koran. For instance, Prophet Muhammad is an imposter and his Koran is a stock of heresy. The Koranic Satan becomes a font of challenge for the righteous. The Koranic paradise has interesting details for English readers. The Koranic image of Hell trees becomes common in the West. The Koran has been presented to the Western world as promoting Islamic extremism and threatening the Western civil society. For some modern diehard fanatics, smashing or burning copies of the Arabic Qur’ān is a symbol of personal revenge and attack on Muslims’ dignity. The spread of genuine information about Qur’ān and Prophet Muhammad helps to appreciate Islam and Muslims

An Application of Authorship Attribution by Intertextual Distance in English

Une application d’attribution d’auteur au moyen de la distance intertextuelle en anglais Le calcul de distance intertextuelle que C. et D. Labbé appliquent aux textes français peut être utilisé pour différencier les œuvres d’au moins deux auteurs dramatiques contemporains de l’époque élisabéthaine, William Shakespeare et Thomas Middleton. Bien que les 46 textes sous étude, transcrits avec une orthographe moderne, ne soient pas lemmatisés et que seuls des échantillons de textes de même longueur aient été utilisés, les indices de distance intertextuelle qu’on a pu ainsi établir empiriquement sont du même ordre de grandeur que ceux qu’ont établis C. et D. Labbé pour le français. Timon of Athens considéré comme étant pour deux-tiers de Shakespeare et pour un tiers de Middleton se place entre le groupe des œuvres de Shakespeare et celui des œuvres de Middleton dans une analyse multidimensionnelle de 1035 distances intertextuelles.The method of Intertextual Distances, which C. and D. Labbé applied in French, can be used to differentiate by author at least two contemporary Elizabethan/Jacobean playwrights, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. Although the 46 modern-spelling texts in question were not lemmatized, and only truncated text samples of the same length were used, the resulting empirical indices of intertextual distance in English were of the same order of magnitude as those established by the Labbés in French. Timon of Athens, considered to be two-thirds by Shakespeare and one third by Middleton, is placed between the Shakespeare cluster and the Middleton cluster in a multidimensional scaling of the 1035 intertextual distances

Function Word Adjacency Networks and Early Modern Plays

The Word Adjacency Network method underpinning the New Oxford Shakespeare’s attribution of the Henry VI plays to Christopher Marlowe as co-author has not been independently tested and is only now being subjected to critiques. The response of Segarra et al. (2019) to criticism by Pervez Rizvi (2018) barely alleviates concerns. This article demonstrates that sections of the plays designated as Shakespeare’s were not detected as Shakespeare’s by the method according to the authors’ own definitions, since his “relative entropy” score was often above zero, which according to Segarra et al. (2016) means the play is no more like Shakespeare’s style than it is like the combined style of all six playwrights tested. The disproportionate representation of Shakespeare in the underlying dataset, combined with a mathematical procedure intended to remove “background noise” may explain Shakespeare’s hovering around the zero line. A claimed concordance with the results of other stylometric tests giving parts of 1 Henry VI to Marlowe is demonstrably not present. The high success rates claimed for the method in Eisen at al. (2018) are based on a flawed validation process known as overfitting, an interpretive method altered to improve success percentages, and the effects of disparate canon sizes for which the equations fail to adequately compensate. It is argued that in the light of potential flaws in the method, and the authors’ misrepresentation of their results, the conclusions of both Segarra et al.’s 2016 article and Eisen et al.’s 2018 study should be set aside

Sonido y poesía: el signicado escondido: Un acercamiento cognitivo a estructuras de sonido significativas en poemas de Marlowe, Hopkins, Williams, Spark y Heaney

Tesis de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filología, leída el 30-11-2010Depto. de Estudios Ingleses: Lingüística y LiteraturaFac. de FilologíaTRUEpu

At sea, in text, and on stage: Islam and Muslims in Early Modern English drama

This thesis considers the portrayal of Islam and Muslims in Early Modern English drama. It begins with an analysis of the various types of relations that existed between the English and the Muslims of the day, particularly the Ottoman Turks and the North African Moors. Relations existed across almost all social groups, leading to a contradictory way of perceiving the Islamic world. Muslims were admired and envied for their superior wealth and spectacular exoticism; yet, were also vilified as followers of a deadly rival faith. Such ambiguity is reflected in the drama of the time and to demonstrate this, four specific plays, $Tamburlaine$ $The$ $Great$ $Parts$ $I$ and $II$, $A$ $Christian$ $Turned$ $Turk$, $The$ $Tragedy$ $of$ $Othello$: $The$ $Noble$ $Moor$ $of$ $Venice$, and $The$ $Renegado$, are compared and evaluated by studying their depictions of Islam and Muslims. The plays all share a number of common themes, with the most pertinent being the fear of English Christians ‘turning Turk’ or converting to Islam. Each play offers its own unique take on this phenomenon. Finally, the discussion is modernised when it is shown that the key worries which plagued the Early Modern mind are in fact, the same that plague thinkers today

Spectacle in Early Modern English Drama

The early modern English theater abounds with sights that were prepared, designed, and built to be seen. Playwrights conjured evocative and terrifying spectacles for their productions on the London stages between 1576 and the early 1640s, and publishers preserved those moments in printed plays with stage directions. Early modern play scripts call for flayed skins, arrows shot through hearts, tritons in flowing rivers, Zeus's thunderbolts, fiery hellmouths, brazen heads that speak, vengeful ghosts, bridled kings, cannibalistic feasts, enlivened statues, hungry bears, sea battles, naked puppets, vomiting wives, cursing monsters, and the hand of God. Determining how these spectacles operate is the purpose of this dissertation. I argue that spectacle--the hypervisual shows demanded by playwrights in stage directions and dialogue cues--is a fundamental tool of early modern dramatists. In the hands of certain playwrights, spectacle defamiliarizes the known world, making it strange and evocative in order to guide the audience to re-imagine their understanding of such objects and events. Spectacles such as mythological figures, broken bodies, talking dogs, and military machines compel audiences to recognize but then reassess what those images signify. Each of the dissertation's four chapters focuses on a spectacle that is indicative of a larger pattern in dramatic literature. Chapter One, "Herculean Efforts: Spectacle as Rebellion," studies the liminal figure of Hercules in Thomas Heywood's The Silver Age (1611), Jasper Heywood's 1561 translation of Seneca's Hercules Furens; and Thomas Heywood's The Brazen Age (1613). Herculean spectacle suggests an unnerving connection between spectacular control and rule. The second chapter, "Spectacular Suffering: Edward II and Titus Andronicus," suggests that broken bodies on stage are more compelling when they do not adhere to the decorum that accompanied punishments on the scaffold. Chapter Three, "Bad Dog: Spectacle in The Witch of Edmonton," investigates the unsettling tension between morality and spectacularity that centers around Dog, a devilish talking canine in Thomas Dekker, Thomas Rowley, and John Ford's 1621 true-crime drama. Finally, "Spectacular Collapse? Tamburlaine, Parts I and II," argues that Tamburlaine's shows demonstrate the instability of spectacular power as they become increasingly illegible to those he would conquer

The literary career of Thomas Lodge, 1579-1596: studies of the plays, prose fiction and verse

This thesis consists of studies of Lodge's writings in the major genres during his literary career, from 1579 to 1596. The first chapter is a biographical sketch, with particular attention to that period. The literary career is seen as a diversion and a postponement of his real vocations, medicine and Catholicism. The sixth chapter comments briefly on the pamphlets and the later works. The four main chapters treat, respectively, plays, prose fiction, lyric poems and sonnets, narrative and satirical verse. The studies include description of little-known works, structural and prosodic analysis, critical assessment, some textual criticism, source study and consideration of Elizabethan literary history as it impinges upon Lodge's writings. The bibliography is part of the thesis and is intended as a research, tool in its own right. It consists of classified lists of essential materials for scholarly and critical work on Lodge. The thesis is thus partly exploratory and preparatory. The main critical contention is that Lodge's literary reputation has suffered from its subsidiary relationship with Shakespeare's. Lodge excelled as a poet, particularly as a lyrist, and ought to be regarded primarily as such, rather than primarily as a prose romancer (i.e., author of Rosalynde). It is urged that editions of Lodge's works, beginning with the verse, are needed

Shakespeare and Warwickshire Dialect

The article investigates whether Shakespeare used Warwickshire, Cotswold or Midlands dialect, focusing on the sources of recent claims by Bate, Kathman and Wood, most of which derive from early dialect dictionaries compiled by 18th and 19th century antiquarians. It determines that all of these claims – frequently used as a defence against the Shakespeare authorship question – fall into four categories: those based on errors of fact, well-known or widely-used words, poetic inventions, and those derived through circular reasoning. Two problems are identified. Firstly, the source texts on which these dialect claims rest were written two- to three-hundred years after the plays, by which time language-use would not only have evolved, but would have been influenced by Shakespeare. Secondly, the continuing academic taboo surrounding the authorship question has meant that these claims, though easily refuted by searching the Oxford English Dictionary and the digitized texts of Early English Books Online, have gone unchallenged in academia. It demonstrates that querying the validity of arguments derived from an assumed biography can — without in any way disproving that the man from Stratford wrote the body of works we call ‘Shakespeare’ — lead to a better understanding of the way Shakespeare actually used language, and the meanings he intended

Writing Marlowe as writing Shakespeare

This thesis consists of two components: a 70,000-word verse novel and a 50,000-word critical component that has arisen out of the research process for that novel. Creative Component: The Marlowe Papers The Marlowe Papers is a full-length verse novel written entirely in iambic pentameter. As with verse novels such as The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, or The Emperor’s Babe by Bernadine Evaristo, its inspiration, derivation, conventions and scope owe more to the prose novel than to the epic poem. Though there is as yet no widely-accepted definition, a verse novel may be distinguished from an epic poem where it consists, as in this case, of numerous discrete poems, each constituting a ‘chapter’ of the novel. This conception allows for considerable variations in form and tone that would not be possible in the more cohesive tradition of the epic poem. The Marlowe Papers is a fictional autobiography of Christopher Marlowe based on the idea that he used the pseudonym ‘William Shakespeare’ (employing the Stratford merchant as a ‘front’), having faked his own death and fled abroad to escape capital charges for atheism and heresy. The verse novel, written in dramatic scenes, traces his life from his flight on 30 May 1593, through the back-story (starting in 1586) that led to his prosecution, as we similarly track his progress on the Continent and in England until just after James I accedes to the English throne. The poems are a mixture of longer blank verse narratives and smaller, more lyrical poems (including sonnets). Explanatory notes to the poems, and a Dramatis Personae, are included on the advice of my creative supervisor. Critical Component: Writing Marlowe As Writing Shakespeare This part of the thesis explores the relationship between early modern biographies and fiction, questioning certain ‘facts’ of Marlovian and Shakespearean biography in the light of the ‘thought experiment’ of the verse novel. Marlowe’s reputation for violence is reassessed in the light of scholarly doubt about the veracity of the inquest document, and Shakespeare’s sonnets are reinterpreted through the lens of the Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship. The argument is that orthodox and non-Stratfordian theories might be considered competing paradigms; simply different frameworks through which interpretation of the same data leads to different conclusions. Interdisciplinary influences include Kuhn’s philosophy of scientific discovery, post-modern narrativist history, neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics (in the form of the ‘observer effect’). Data that is either anomalous or inexplicable under the orthodox paradigm is demonstrated to support a Marlovian reading, and the current state of the Shakespeare authorship question is assessed. Certain primary source documents were examined at the Bodleian Library, at the British Library, and at Lambeth Palace Library. Versions of Chapters 2, 3 and 4, written under supervision during this doctorate, have all been published, either as a book chapter or as a journal article, within the last year (Barber, 2009, 2010a, b)