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 203
... turn his translation into a Jacobite allegory in which Aeneas stands for James II , however much he may , at some points , remind us of him . Lauderdale's practice is compatible with the careful political distinc- tions Dryden makes in ...
... turn his translation into a Jacobite allegory in which Aeneas stands for James II , however much he may , at some points , remind us of him . Lauderdale's practice is compatible with the careful political distinc- tions Dryden makes in ...
Page 212
... turning between the ' beauteous Order ' of the ' friendly Line ' ( ll . 756 , 768 ) at the beginning and end . The particular ... Turn'd , and return'd , and still a diff'rent way . ( v . 769-74 ) 96 The Trojans are in the world , to the ...
... turning between the ' beauteous Order ' of the ' friendly Line ' ( ll . 756 , 768 ) at the beginning and end . The particular ... Turn'd , and return'd , and still a diff'rent way . ( v . 769-74 ) 96 The Trojans are in the world , to the ...
Page 247
... turns on himself . His horror at his own sin now drives him towards that very suicide ( cf. II . i . 530-1 ) 73 which the lovers had rejected before . The final turn of the tragedy occurs when the reconciled Dorax urges that Sebastian ...
... turns on himself . His horror at his own sin now drives him towards that very suicide ( cf. II . i . 530-1 ) 73 which the lovers had rejected before . The final turn of the tragedy occurs when the reconciled Dorax urges that Sebastian ...
Contents
List of Illustrations བ | 11 |
Introduction I | 11 |
The First Tetralogy and King John | 46 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown
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