Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to DrydenThis is a major study of the relation between poetry and politcs in sixteenth and seventeenth century English literature, focusing in particular on the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden. Howard Erskine-Hill argues that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of the political allegory of Dryden's Absalom and Architophel, and other overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple reference. Drawing on the revisionist trend in recent historiography, and taking issue with recent New Historicist criticism, the book offers new and thought-provoking readings of familiar texts. For example, Shakespeare's Histories, far from endorsing a conservative Tudor myth, are shown to examine and reject divine-right kingship in favour of a political vision of what the succession crisis of the 1590s required. A forgotten political aspect of Hamlet is restored and an anti-Cromwellian strain is identified in Milton's Paradise Lost. Again and again, Professor Erskine-Hill is able to show how some of the most powerful works of the period, works which in the past have been read for their aesthetic achievement and generalized wisdom, in fact contain a political component crucial to our understanding of the poem. |
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Page 192
... kingship in the seventeenth century , grounding the institution in Eden at the head of sacred history . Though Sir Robert Filmer's full statement of this theory in his Patriarcha was not published until the Exclusion Crisis , in 1680 ...
... kingship in the seventeenth century , grounding the institution in Eden at the head of sacred history . Though Sir Robert Filmer's full statement of this theory in his Patriarcha was not published until the Exclusion Crisis , in 1680 ...
Page 195
... kingship applied to the devils are , of course , no problem . But , secondly , metaphor is only part of what we encounter here , for Milton certainly acknowledged the kingship of the Messiah : It is no ' recommendation of royal ...
... kingship applied to the devils are , of course , no problem . But , secondly , metaphor is only part of what we encounter here , for Milton certainly acknowledged the kingship of the Messiah : It is no ' recommendation of royal ...
Page 252
... kingship was ever present even in the absence of a king . Whether seen as an opportunity , an ideal , or a warning , kingship is the one dominant landmark in the political terrain between the late sixteenth and the later seventeenth ...
... kingship was ever present even in the absence of a king . Whether seen as an opportunity , an ideal , or a warning , kingship is the one dominant landmark in the political terrain between the late sixteenth and the later seventeenth ...
Contents
List of Illustrations བ | 11 |
Introduction I | 11 |
The First Tetralogy and King John | 46 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown
Common terms and phrases
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