Violent liminalities in Early Modern Culture is a methodologically innovative book combining the twin disciplines of queer theory and disability studies. It investigates the violence feared from, and directed at, inhabitants of the ‘betwixt and between’ spaces of early modern literature and culture, through a focus on the perpetuated metamorphic states of Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s liminal figures including Lavinia, Puck, and Britomart. With chapters on gender, sexuality, adolescence, madness, and physical disability, Kaye McLelland applies a bi-theoretical lens to interrogate the ways in which being simultaneously ‘neither’ and ‘both’ brings to bear the non-normative disruption identified by queer theory in ways that use binary systems against themselves. For many of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s characters, the ‘in-between’ state, whether ritually or otherwise induced, transforms the instantaneous binary threshold of the limen into a permanent ‘habitation’. This created space is one of great power that is feared and violently countered by those who would shut it down. Set against the literary history of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s Ovidianism and festivity, and the historical context of the post-Reformation transformation from a tertiary to a binary model of the afterlife, this volume identifies a persistent positioning of liminal literary figures in proximity to the liminality of the dead and dying, whilst simultaneously tracing the positive ways in which these inhabitants of the powerful ‘betwixt and between’ are depicted.

Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced A.I. systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one’s conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement (contemplating the relationship of the reckoning system to the world). While A.I. developers have mastered reckoning, they are still working towards the creation of judgement. This book sheds light on the reckoning and judgement of conscience by demonstrating how these concepts are explored in Everyman, Doctor Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Academic, student, or general-interest readers discover the complexity and multiplicity of the early modern concept of conscience, which is informed by the scholastic intellectual tradition, juridical procedures of the court of Chancery, the practical advice of Protestant casuistry, and Reformation theology. The aims are to examine the rubrics for thinking through, regulating, and judging actions that define the various consciences of Shakespeare’s day, to use these rubrics to interpret questions of truth and action in early modern plays, and to offer insights into what it is about conscience that developers want to grasp to eliminate the difference between human and non-human intelligences, and achieve true A.I.

Shakespeare’s Forgotten Allegory posits three startling points: that we have today forgotten a cultural icon that helped to bring about the Renaissance; that this character, used to distil classical wisdom regarding how to raise children to become moral adults, consistently appeared in plays performed between 1350 and 1650; and that the character was often utilised by the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and therefore adds a long forgotten allegorical narrative to their works. This evidence-based reappraisal of some of the most iconic works in Western literature suggests that a core element of their content has been ‘lost’ for centuries. This text will appeal to anyone with an interest in late medieval and early modern drama, especially the works of Shakespeare; to those interested in the history of teaching and child rearing; to anyone curious about the practical application of philosophy in society; to anyone that would like to know more about the crucial and defining period today known as the Renaissance, and how and why society was redesigned by those with influence; and to all those who would like to know more about how history, which though sometimes misplaced, continues to influenced our modern world.

Sidney Homan defines a pivotal line as “a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play ... a magnet to which the rest of the play, scenes before and after, adheres.” He offers his personal choices of such lines in five plays by Shakespeare and works by Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, Shepard, and Stoppard. Drawing on his own experience in the theatre as actor and director and on campus as a teacher and scholar, he pairs a Shakespearean play with one by a modern playwright as mirrors for each other. One reviewer calls his approach “ground-breaking.” Another observes that his “experience with the particular plays he has chosen is invaluable” since it allows us to find “a wedge into such iconic texts.” Academics and students alike will find this volume particularly useful in aiding their own discovery of a pivotal line or moment in the experience of reading about, watching, or performing in a play.

This volume takes a deep dive into the philosophical hermeneutics of Shakespearean tradition, providing insight into the foundations, theories, and methodologies of hermeneutics in Shakespeare. Central to this research, this volume investigates fundamental questions including: what is philosophical hermeneutics, why philosophical hermeneutics, what do literary and cultural hermeneutics do, and in what ways can literary and cultural hermeneutics benefit the interpretation of Shakespearean plays? Hermeneutic Shakespeare guides the reader through two main discussions. Beginning with the understanding of "Philosophical Hermeneutics", and the general principles of literary and cultural hermeneutics, the volume includes philosophers such as Friedrich Ast, Daniel Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and more recently, Steven Connor. Part Two of this volume applies universal principles of philosophical hermeneutics to explicate the historical, philosophical, acquired, and applied literary interpretations through the critical practices of Shakespeare’s plays or their adaptations, including Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and The Comedy of Errors. Aimed at scholars and students alike, this volume aims to contribute to contemporary understanding of Shakespeare and literature hermeneutics. Chapters 2, 5, and 6 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.

Shakespeare and Indian Nationalism aims to articulate the reception of Shakespeare by the 19th-century Indian intelligentsia from Bengal and their ambivalent approach to the Indian Renaissance and consequent nationalist project. Showcasing the cultural politics of British imperialism, this volume focuses on six early nationalist writers and their engagement with Shakespeare: Hemchandra Bandopadhay (1838–1903), Girishchandra Ghosh (1844–1912), Purnachandra Basu (1844–unknown), Iswarchandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891), Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya(1838–1894), and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and a host of prominent writers of cultural politics, nationalism and Indian history, this interdisciplinary approach combines postcolonial studies and Shakespeare studies in an attempt to reconcile the existence of an unbridled admiration for an English cultural icon in India alongside the rise of nationalism and a fierce resistance to British rule. The book, finally, moves to re-explore Shakespeare's position in academic, political and popular nationalist discourses in postcolonial India.

Tombs in Shakespearean Drama explores the rhetorical deployment of tombs and monuments on the early modern stage, demonstrating their historiographic power and mythmaking potential. By analyzing references to tombs in plays by Shakespeare and others in conjunction with extant monuments, this volume demonstrates how these references function in two overlapping ways in period drama: monuments act as repositories of information about the past, and they allow the living to construct and preserve fictive narratives. The stage exposes the flimsy materiality of paper, placing less value on the written word than period poetry. In this way, critics have perhaps oversold as universal Shakespeare’s poetic praise of stone. Tombs within plays act as a powerful historical and narrative medium, raising the stakes to provide the stage with the illusion of permanency. Playwrights use tombs to anchor the stage action, giving a sense of lasting importance to dramatic events and combatting the ephemeral nature of the playhouse. In drama, Shakespeare and others drew on the persona preserved on tombs; this volume widens our view of how these representations interacted in the commemorative economy of early modern England. Within the playhouse, it was the tomb, not the tome, that stood as a symbol of permanence.

It has been over two decades since the publication of the last major edited collection focused on psychoanalysis and early modern culture. In Shakespeare studies, the New Historicism and cognitive psychology have hindered a dynamic conversation engaging depth-oriented models of the mind from taking place. The essays in New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains seek to redress this situation, by engaging a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic theory and criticism, from Freud to the present, to read individual plays closely. These essays show how psychoanalytic theory helps us to rethink the plays’ history of performance; their treatment of gender, sexuality, and race; their view of history and trauma; and the ways in which they anticipate contemporary psychodynamic treatment. Far from simply calling for a conventional "return to Freud," the essays collected here initiate an exciting conversation between Shakespeare studies and psychoanalysis in the hopes of radically transforming both disciplines. It is time to listen, once again, to seething brains.

The essays in this book offer new perspectives on the concept of liminality. They explore the relevance and significance of the limen or threshold from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, and across a broad range of historical periods. The authors all seek to revisit key questions raised in recent literary and cultural criticism, whilst also moving that discussion in new directions. In particular, the essays stress the importance of defining liminality for particular literary and cultural contexts, and highlight the fact that whilst it is liberating and progressive in some instances, in others it is violent and oppressive. Examining texts from the early modern to the postmodern periods, by authors on both sides of the Atlantic, the volume embraces a wide range of literary forms, including novels, travel narratives, religious texts, and philosophical treatises; it also includes consideration of non-literary forms of representation such as photography. This book reveals the complexity of the concept of liminality, and underscores its powerfulness and potential for understanding the ways in which both individuals and communities, in the past and in the present day, negotiate states of transition, and give expression to their experience of being 'in-between'.

Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas is a trans-cultural collection of studies on visual treatments of the phenomena of suffering and pain in early modern culture. Ranging geographically from Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries to Chile, Mexico, and the Philippines and chronologically from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these studies variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences. From examination of bodies shown victimized by brutal public torture to the sublimation of physical suffering conveyed through the incised lines of Counter-Reformation engravings, the authors consider depictions of pain and suffering as conduits to the divine or as guides to social behaviour; indeed, often the two functions overlap.