Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England
- ISBN-10
- 0226445704
- ISBN-13
- 9780226445700
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 277
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2004-11
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Author
- Jeffrey Knapp
Description
Most contemporary critics characterize Shakespeare and his tribe of fellow playwrights and players as resolutely secular, interested in religion only as a matter of politics or as a rival source of popular entertainment. Yet as Jeffrey Knapp demonstrates in this radical new reading, a surprising number of writers throughout the English Renaissance, including Shakespeare himself, represented plays as supporting the cause of true religion. To be sure, Renaissance playwrights rarely sermonized in their plays, which seemed preoccupied with sex, violence, and crime. During a time when acting was regarded as a kind of vice, many theater professionals used their apparent godlessness to advantage, claiming that it enabled them to save wayward souls the church could not otherwise reach. The stage, they argued, made possible an ecumenical ministry, which would help transform Reformation England into a more inclusive Christian society. Drawing on a variety of little-known as well as celebrated plays, along with a host of other documents from the English Renaissance, Shakespeare's Tribe changes the way we think about Shakespeare and the culture that produced him. Winner of the Best Book in Literature and Language from the Association of American Publishers' Professional/Scholarly division, the Conference on Christianity and Literature Book Award, and the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2002-07-02
- 295 pages
- Paperback
- University of Chicago Press
Similar books
-
Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays
By David N. BeauregardSee Gary Taylor, ''Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,'' English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 297–98, and David N. Beauregard, ''New Light on Shakespeare's ... See also Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare's Tribe, 52–54. 4.
-
Shakespeare's Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage
By J. Mayer... Lettice, Countess of Leicester (later wife of Christopher Blount), 106 Knollys, William, 124 Knowles, Ronald, 19, ... 31, 32, 33, 126 Manners, Roger, 5th Earl of Rutland, 104, 193 n 17 Margaret of Anjou, 47 Marguerite of Angoulême, ...
-
Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Wonder, the Sacred, and the Supernatural
By Nick Davis, Nandini DasVol. 6, 115. Jeffrey Knapp also discusses crusading in the Henriad and suggests it reflects anxieties about England's relation to Christendom after the Act of Supremacy. See Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation and Theater in Renaissance ...
-
Shakespeare's Possible Worlds
By Simon PalfreyRichard Fowler (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). ... Berry, Ralph, ed., On Directing Shakespeare (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977). ... Brook, Peter, “Finding Shakespeare on Film”, Tulane Drama Review 11:1 (1966).
-
The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare
By Mary Jo KietzmanCertainly York is, as Ken Jackson writes, a “pivotal political figure,” who Shakespeare marks as an Abraham when in 2.2.77–85 he appears before the Queen with looks “full of careful business” to say, “Here am I left to underprop his ...
-
Heterodox Shakespeare
By Sean BensonIn The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare's Stratford: Society, Religion, School and Stage, edited by J. R. Mulryne, 1–12. ... Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England.
-
Faith in Shakespeare
By Richard C. McCoyRichard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1–39. 34. Gary Taylor, “Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton,” English Literary Renaissance 24 (1992): 283–314; Arthur Marotti ...
-
Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will
By Wilson Richard WilsonShakespeare and Middleton seem such strange bedfellows, the one with so many suspect Catholic connections in Stratford, the other an official of the City of London Protestant elite, that their alliance in the aftermath of the 1605 ...
-
Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion
By David Loewenstein, Michael Witmore22 Despite the presence of earlier libel motifs, the invocation of Judaism on the early modern stage was not ... 23 Eva Johanna Holmberg, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination: A Scattered Nation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 114.
-
Believing in Shakespeare: Studies in Longing
By Claire McEachernJeff Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe does; he explores the address of Elizabethan drama to the Elizabethan Settlement and does so by tracing persuasive analogies between the cultural work of religious institutions and that of the theater.7 ...