ABSTRACT

Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today. Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from laws of defamation in Othello to the competing loyalties of companionate marriage and male friendship in The Changeling. In doing so she reveals a wealth of new insights, sometimes surprising but always original and engrossing. At the same time, these essays also provide a fascinating account of the rise of feminist scholarship since the 1980s and the diversifying of `new historicist' approaches over the same period.

Reading Shakespeare Historically will fascinate and provoke students of shakespeare and his historical age, and general readers with an urge to understand how the culture and history of our past illuminates the key scoial and political issues of today.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

chapter |16 pages

‘Why Should He Call Her Whore?'

Defamation and Desdemona's case

chapter |13 pages

‘No Offence I' Th' World’

Unlawful marriage in Hamlet

chapter |16 pages

Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare's Learned Heroines

‘These are old paradoxes'

chapter |13 pages

Twins and Travesties

Gender, dependency and sexual availability in Twelfth Night

chapter |19 pages

Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect

Erasmus's familiar letters and Shakespeare's King Lear

chapter |16 pages

Alien Intelligence

Mercantile exchange and knowledge transactions in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta

chapter |18 pages

Companionate Marriage Versus Male Friendship

Anxiety for the lineal family in Jacobean drama

chapter |16 pages

Unpicking the Tapestry

The scholar of women's history as Penelope among her suitors

chapter |10 pages

Conclusion

What happens in Hamlet?