Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia

Negotiating the Memory of Elizabeth I on the Jacobean Stage

Yuichi Tsukada (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

232 Seiten

2019
The Arden Shakespeare (Verlag)
978-1-350-06722-6 (ISBN)

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In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited the English throne. During James’s reign, England continued to hark back to Elizabeth, comparing him with his predecessor – not always in a way that was either flattering or pleasing to James. Critics have traditionally assumed that Shakespeare avoided involving himself in this discourse. In this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, however, Yuichi Tsukada demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics behind the nostalgia. Based upon close readings of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, the book traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the memory of Elizabeth.

Yuichi Tsukada offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama. For instance, what was the original significance of the two contentious prophecies – 'none of woman born' and the march of Birnam Wood – in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of Coriolanus? Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse throughout the first decade of James’s reign, the impact of this cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama has been ignored or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare’s Jacobean drama by focusing on the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England’s dead queen.

Yuichi Tsukada is Associate Professor of English at Doshisha University, Japan. He received his BA and MA from the University of Tokyo and his PhD from King’s College London. His journal articles on Shakespeare have won him fellowships and awards, including the Young Scholar Award of Special Merit from the English Literary Society of Japan.

Acknowledgements
A Note on Texts

Introduction

1 Macbeth: Performing a Caesarean Section on the Mother Country

2 Antony and Cleopatra: The Competition for Representing the Queen

3 Coriolanus: Disarming the Memory of Elizabethan England

4 Cymbeline: The Politics of Remembering the Besieged Heroine

Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	04.07.2019
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	129 x 198 mm
Gewicht	344 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-350-06722-9 / 1350067229
ISBN-13	978-1-350-06722-6 / 9781350067226
Zustand	Neuware