For writers in the early modern period, thinking about royal favorites inevitably meant thinking about the uneasy intersection of the personal and the public in a political system traditionally organized around patronage and intimacy. Depictions of favoritism - in a variety of texts including plays, poems, libels, and pamphlets - explore the most fundamental ideological questions concerning personal monarchy and the early modern public sphere, questions about the nature and limits of prerogative and about the enfranchisement or otherwise of subjects. In this study, Curtis Perry examines the ideological underpinnings of the heated controversies surrounding powerful royal favorites and the idea of favoritism in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Perry argues that the discourse of corrupt favoritism is this period's most important unofficial vehicle for exploring constitutional unease concerning the nature and limits of personal monarchy within the balanced English
It is a critical commonplace to note sharp cultural differences between Elizabethan and Jacobean England. But how and why did this transition take place? What kinds of decisions and assumptions were involved as writers responded to the new king? How did residual Elizabethan expectations and habits of mind shape the English response to James I, and what were the consequences? How much control did James have over his reception? This study examines these questions in detail by exploring a wide range of texts written during the first decade of his reign in England, from 1603 to 1613. At stake in these questions are some larger issues which have been central to much recent historically orientated work on English Renaissance literature, concerning the relationships between king and culture, literature and authority. Curtis Perry's study provokes a fresh examination of the contingencies shaping long-familiar notions of what constitutes the Jacobean as a literary period.
Shakespeare's tragic characters have often been seen as forerunners of modern personhood. It has been assumed that Shakespeare was able to invent such lifelike figures in part because of his freedom from the restrictions of classical form. Curtis Perry instead argues that characters such as Hamlet and King Lear have seemed modern to us in part because they are so robustly connected to the tradition of Senecan tragedy. Resituating Shakespearean tragedy in this way - as backward looking as well as forward looking - makes it possible to recover a crucial political dimension. Shakespeare saw Seneca as a representative voice from post-republican Rome: in plays such as Coriolanus and Othello he uses Senecan modes of characterization to explore questions of identity in relation to failures of republican community. This study has important implications for the way we understand character, community, and alterity in early modern drama.
Shakespeare's tragic characters have often been seen as forerunners of modern personhood. It has been assumed that Shakespeare was able to invent such lifelike figures in part because of his freedom from the restrictions of classical form. Curtis Perry instead argues that characters such as Hamlet and King Lear have seemed modern to us in part because they are so robustly connected to the tradition of Senecan tragedy. Resituating Shakespearean tragedy in this way - as backward looking as well as forward looking - makes it possible to recover a crucial political dimension. Shakespeare saw Seneca as a representative voice from post-republican Rome: in plays such as Coriolanus and Othello he uses Senecan modes of characterization to explore questions of identity in relation to failures of republican community. This study has important implications for the way we understand character, community, and alterity in early modern drama.
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