Emblems of Mortality: Iconographic Experiments in Shakespeare's TheatreIn our own age, the engagement with death has been discretely narrowed into a brief process of formal commemoration and burial, but in Shakespeare's time it was ritualized into the very fabric of everyday life, where the reminders of death, the journey to the grave, and the moment of expiry were all central to the cultural engagement with mortality in post-Reformation England. Inevitably, this way of seeing the world impacted the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, not only in relation to the intellectual content of the drama but with regard to its visual impressions as well. Emblems of Mortality explores the relationship between Shakespeare's theatre and popular memento mori and funereal iconography of the Renaissance, combining cultural studies and historicism with semiotic analysis of period iconography. Through close reading of Elizabethan signs and sign systems with attention to historical context, the work seeks to demonstrate the quality and intention of some of Shakespeare's theatrical designs in a way that will appeal to scholars of drama and students of Shakespeare's work. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Emblems of an English Eden | 15 |
Iconic Monsters in Paradise | 39 |
Copyright | |
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Alciati's allusion amore arrows Black Prince bones Boxgrove Priory Bullingbrook Capulet Carlin Cathedral Chantry charnel house Choice of Emblemes Church of St Coriolanus Cupid and Death Cyril Tourneur dance of death danse macabre dead Death figure Death soldier death's head doth early modern earthly Edward Elizabethan emblem books emblematic emblematists Emblematvm England English paradise example Falstaff father Frye Gaunt's Geffrey Whitney's grave grinning Hamlet Harry Morris Henry Hercules heroic Hotspur human Hydra icon iconographic idea inheritance Jacobean kill King John life-in-death lines living London love and death Marcius Mars Medieval memento mori Michael Neill Minerva morte motif myth Newark-on-Trent notion Paris perhaps phoenix physical Plate play play's regeneration Richard Richard II Romeo and Juliet scene sense Shakespeare's Shakespeare's theatre Simeoni's sixteenth century skeletal Death skeleton spiritual suggests Tewkesbury Abbey theatrical theme thou tradition University Press visual Whitney Yorick's skull York young youth
References to this book
Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters Frederick Kiefer Limited preview - 2003 |