'A Midsummer Nights Dream' in Context

Keith Linley

Description

The cultural contexts of 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream'

Everything you need to know about the cultural contexts of 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream'. Is this just a light-hearted romp or is Shakespeare trying to make serious points about courtship, love, marriage and human folly? This book provides detailed in-depth discussion of the various influences that an Elizabethan audience would have brought to interpreting the play. How did people think about the world, about God, about sin, about kings, about civilized conduct, about the magic and madness of love and attraction? Historical, literary, political, sociological backgrounds are explained within the biblical-moral matrices by which the play would have been judged. This book links real life in the late 1590s to the world on the stage. Discover the orthodox beliefs people held about religion. Meet the Devil, Sin and Death. Learn about the social hierarchy, gender relationships, court corruption, class tensions, the literary profile of the time, attitudes to comedy – and all the subversions, transgressions, and oppositions that made the play a hilarious farce but also an unsettling picture of a world so close to disaster.

Introduction; About this book – What is a context?; Part I. The Inherited Past; Prologue: The setting; i. The Historical Context; ii . The Elizabethan World Order: From Divinity To Dust; iii. Sin, Death and the Prince of Darkness; iv. The Seven Cardinal Virtues; v. Kingship; vi. Patriarchy, Family Authority and Gender relationships; vii. Man in His Place; viii. Images of Disorder: The Religious Context Unsettling Questions; Part II. The Elizabethan Present; ix. The Context of Comedy; x. Theseus and the Setting; xi. Puck’s Permutations: The Context of Love; xii. ‘Sweet Moon’: The Context of Magic; xiii. Literary Context; xiv. Playing Parts; xv. Transgressions and Translations; Bibliography

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 21 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783085576
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM IN CONTEXT
Anthem Perspectives in Literature
Titles in the Anthem Perspectives in Literature series are designed to contextualize classic works of literature for readers today within their original social and cultural environments. The books present historical, biographical, political, artistic, moral, religious and philosophical material from the period that enable readers to understand a text’s meaning as it would have struck the original audience. These approachable but informative books aim to uncover the period and the people for whom the texts were written, their values and views, their anxieties and demons, what made them laugh and cry, their loves and hates. The series is targeted at high-achieving A Level, International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement pupils, undergraduates following Shakespeare and Renaissance drama modules and an intellectually curious audience.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM IN CONTEXT
MAGIC, MADNESS AND MAYHEM
Keith Linley
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2016
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Keith Linley 2016

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-555-2 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-555-X (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Introduction
About This Book
What Is a Context?
Further Reading
PART I THE INHERITED PAST
Prologue
The Setting
1. The Historical Context
1.1 The Elizabethan Context: An Overview
2. The Elizabethan World Order: From Divinity to Dust
2.1 Cosmology
2.2 The Great Chain of Being
2.3 Human Hierarchy
2.4 The Social Pyramid of Power
2.5 The Better Sort
2.6 The Middling Sort
2.7 The Lower Orders
2.8 The Theory of the Humours
2.9 The Rest of Creation
2.10 Order
3. Sin, Death and the Prince of Darkness
3.1 Sin and Death
4. The Seven Cardinal Virtues
5. Kingship
5.1 Preparation for Rule
5.2 A King’s View of His Office
5.3 Theseus and Queen Elizabeth
6. Patriarchy, Family Authority and Gender Relationships
6.1 Patriarchy and a Woman’s Place
6.2 Renaissance Improvements
7. Man in His Place
8. Images of Disorder: The Religious Context
8.1 Unsettling Questions
PART II THE ELIZABETHAN PRESENT
9. The Context of Comedy
10. Theseus and the Setting
11. Puck’s Permutations: The Context of Love
12. ‘Sweet Moon’: The Woods and the Context of Magic
12.1 Moonlight and Madness
12.2 The Ambiguous Status of Magic
12.3 John Dee
13. Literary Context
13.1 Genre
13.2 The Text Alone
13.3 A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s Oeuvre
13.4 The Literature of the Time
13.5 Sources
13.6 Some Critical Reactions
14. Playing Parts
15. Transgressions and Translations
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
About This Book
This book concentrates on the contexts from which the play emerges, those characteristics of life in Elizabethan England which are reflected in the values and views William Shakespeare brings to the text and which affect how a contemporary might have responded to it. The central context comprises the writer, the text, the audience and all the views, values and beliefs held by the writer and audience and encapsulated in the text. These values are the prime concern of this book. There is a secondary context that is also a focus. A play does not suddenly come into being without having a background. It does not exist in vacuo. It will have its own unique features, but has characteristics inherited from its author and generic traits derived from the writing of its time, particularly from the drama.
Other secondary contexts – the actors, the acting space, the social mix of any one audience – do not figure in this study except as occasional incidentals. There are tertiary contexts, such as the afterlife of the text (its printed form, how subsequent ages interpreted it, performed it, changed it – its performance history). There is also the critical backstory (the profile showing how critics of subsequent times bring their agendas and the values and prejudices of their period to analysis of the text). These are referenced incidentally where they seem useful and relevant, but are not a major concern. Any scholarly edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will cover these areas in greater detail.
The book is for students preparing assignments and examinations for Shakespeare modules. The marking criteria at any level explicitly or implicitly require that students show a consistently well-developed and consistently detailed understanding of the significance and influence of contexts in which literary texts are written and understood. This means responding to the play in the ways Shakespeare’s audience would have done. The following material will enable you to acquire a surer grasp of this cultural context – the social-political conditions from which the play emerged, the literary profile prevailing when it was written and its religious-moral dimension. The setting is ostensibly pagan, with ancient Greek names for the courtly characters and references to the gods and goddesses of the classical world, but this is merely a literary fashion of Shakespeare’s time and is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Furthermore, since the play was written in an age of faith, when the Bible’s teachings and sermons heard in church formed part of every man and woman’s mindset, it is vital to recreate those factors, for the actions of the characters will be assessed by Christian criteria. You may not agree with the values of the time or the views propounded in the play, but you do need to understand how belief mediated the possible responses of the audience that watched the play in 1595–6. A key concept in this book’s approach is that Dream is full of sins, transgressions, boundary crossing and rule breaking in the personal world and, in less dominant ways, in the public and political arena as well. Alerted to the transgressive behaviour of Egeus, Hermia and Lysander in the opening scene, an audience member, who would not know the story (as it is largely the author’s fabrication), would expect they be punished. Though biblical values would be applied to the action, there is much more going on scene by scene than a series of echoes of or allusions to what the Bible says about virtue and vice. Interwoven are concerns about rule of self (a recurrent theme in all the comedies), patriarchy and paternal rule, the dangers of appetite unrestrained and the inconsistency, unpredictability and sheer oddness of love.
What Is a Context?
Any document – literary or non-literary – comes from an environment and has that environment embedded in it, overtly and covertly. Its context is its DNA, the conditions which produced it; the biographical, social, political, historical, cultural circumstances which form it; and the values operating within it and affecting the experience of it. A text in isolation is simply an accumulation of words carrying growing, developing meanings as the writing/performance progresses. It is two dimensional, a lexical, grammatical construct and the sum of its literal contents. It has meaning. We can understand what it is about, how its characters interact and how their conflicts lead to crises which may or may not be resolved, but context provides a third dimension, making meaning comprehensible within the cultural values of the time. Context is the sum of all the influences the writer brings to the text and all the influences the viewer/reader deploys in experiencing it. This book concentrates on the archaeology of the play, recovering how it would have been understood in 1596, recovering the special flavour and prevailing attitudes of the time and displaying the factors that shaped its meaning for that time and that audience. A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Context offers the views, prejudices, controversies and basic beliefs buried in the play – all the significations of society embedded in the text that added together make it what Shakespeare intended it to be or as closely as we can be reasonably sure. Recovering the mindset, nuances and values Shakespeare intentionally or unconsciously works into Dream , and how his audience would have interpreted them, means unearthing and recreating the Elizabethan period. To achieve that a range of aspects is considered, but two key contextual areas dominate the approach of this book: the religious and the sociopolitical. The multiple transgressions represented in the play would have been interpr