Money makes the world go round: Shakespeare, commerce and community

In early modern England money was of central importance to areas of social life that are in the modern world separate from the study of economics. The demand for liquid capital and the practical problems associated with the devising of a monetary system that was reliable exercised the minds of philosophers, social commentators, and dramatists. The template for discussion was laid down by Aristotle, who perceived financial activity as part of the larger community and its various modes of social interaction. Copernicus wrote a treatise on money, as had Nicholas of Oresme before him. But in the sixteenth century dramatists turned their attention to what we would call “economics” and its impact on social life. Writers such as Thomas Lupton, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare all dealt with related issues of material greed, usury, hospitality and friendship and the ways in which they transformed, and were transformed by particular kinds of social and economic practice. These concerns fed into the investigation of different kinds of society, particularly turning their attention to their strengths and weaknesses, and in the case of dramatists providing imaginative accounts of the kinds of life that these innovations produced

Jennifer Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading

First paragraph: In her book Literacy and Orality: Composition, Performance and Transmission (2018) the cultural anthropologist Ruth Finnegan challenges the idea that ‘literary forms [are] sometimes said to go with particular forms of society’, and she associates the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong with an essentialist ‘binary typology’ dependent upon preserving a fundamental historical distinction between ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’. Jennifer Richards’ new book, with its insistence upon ‘voices’ and subtitled ‘A New History of Reading’ takes to heart Finnegan’s observation that the two categories of speaking and writing are fundamentally trans-historical and have always been ‘mixed’ in practice. This is substantially, though not entirely, the view that cultural anthropologist Jack Goody subscribes to in part, although his suggestion that ‘a new means of communication does not replace the earlier (except in certain limited spheres); it adds to it and alters it’, (Myth, Ritual and The Oral (2010) p.155) offers a crucial modification

Shakespeare and the genre of comedy

Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of tragedy and comedy have been depicted in antithetical opposition to one another. Setting out from the hypothesis that antitheses are aspects of a deeper unity where one informs the construction of the other’s image this thesis questions the hierarchy of genre through a form of ludic postmodernism that interrogates aesthetics in the same way as comedy interrogates ethics and the law of genre. Tracing the chain of signification as laid out by Derrida between theatre as pharmakon and the thaumaturgical influence of the pharmakeus or dramatist, early modern comedy can be identified as re-enacting Renaissance versions of the rite of the pharmakos, where a scapegoat for the ills attendant upon society is chosen and exorcised. Recognisable pharmakoi are scapegoat figures such as Shakespeare’s Shylock, Malvolio, Falstaff and Parolles but the city comedies of this period also depict prostitutes and the unmarried as necessary comic sacrifices for the reordering of society. Throughout this thesis an attempt has been made to position Shakespeare’s comic drama in the specific historical location of early modern London by not only placing his plays in the company of his contemporaries but by forging a strong theoretical engagement with questions of law in relation to issues of genre. The connection Shakespearean comedy makes with the laws of early modern England is highly visible in The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew and the laws which they scrutinise are peculiar to the regulation of gendered interaction, namely marital union and the power and authority imposed upon both men and women in patriarchal society. Thus, a pivotal section on marriage is required to pinion the argument that the libidinized economy of the early modern stage perpetuates the principle of an excluded middle, comic u-topia, or Derridean ‘non-place’, where implicit contradictions are made explicit. The conclusion that comic denouements are disappointing in their resolution of seemingly insurmountable dilemmas can therefore be reappraised as the outcome of a dialectical movement, where the possibility of alternatives is presented and assessed. Advancing Hegel’s theory that the whole of history is dialectic comedy can therefore be identified as the way in which a society sees itself, dramatically representing the hopes and fears of an entire community.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Othello and Waiting for the Barbarians

Este artículo analiza el papel jugado por los “bárbaros” en la autodefinición de la civilización, considerándolos como simultáneamente “otros” y también simbólicamente centrales a dicho proceso, situados tanto “fuera” como “dentro” de la sociedad. Esta dinámica puede ser explorada en la relación existente entre Othello, de William Shakespeare, y Waiting for the Barbarians, de J.M. Coetze, dos obras a las que, a pesar de estar muy distantes cronológica y culturalmente, se las hace entrar en un diálogo sobre los conceptos del imperio y la colonización.This paper analyses the role of “barbarians” in civilization’s self-definition, considering them as simultaneously “other” but also symbolically central to that process, both “outside” and “within” society. This dynamics can be explored in the relation existing between William Shakespeare’s Othello and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, two works which, albeit being culturally and chronologically apart, are made to enter a fruitful dialogue on empire and colonization

Parody : the new critical idiom

Parody is part of all our lives. It occurs not only in literature, but also in everyday speech, in theatre and television, architecture and films.xii, 197 p.; 20 cm