Secret Shakespeare
eBook - PDF

Secret Shakespeare

Studies in theatre, religion and resistance

  1. 336 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Secret Shakespeare

Studies in theatre, religion and resistance

About this book

Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the last century. No biography of the Bard is now complete without chapters on the paranoia and persecution in which he was educated, or the treason which engulfed his family. Whether to suffer outrageous fortune or take up arms in suicidal resistance was, as Hamlet says, 'the question' that fired Shakespeare's stage. In 'Secret Shakespeare' Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived.Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a 'golden time' of future toleration, 'What's to come' is always unsure. Whether or not 'He died a papist', it is because we can never 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist.This is a fascinating work, which will be essential reading for all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies.

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Yes, you can access Secret Shakespeare by Richard Wilson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Front matter
  2. Dedication
  3. Contents
  4. Acknowledgements
  5. Introduction
  6. 1. Wrapped in a player's hide Shakespeare's secret history
  7. 2. Ghostly fathers Shakeshafte and the Jesuits
  8. 3. Secret as a dumb man Two comedies of Italy and the genesis of secrecy
  9. 4. No news but the old news Shakespeare and the tragedy of Arden
  10. 5. A bloody question The politics of Venus and Adonis
  11. 6. Love in idleness The stripping of the altars in A Midsummer Night's Dream
  12. 7. Dyed in mummy Othello and the mulberries
  13. 8. The pilot's thumb Macbeth and the martyrs'
  14. 9. Voyage to Tunis New history and the old world of The Tempest
  15. 10. Unseasonable laughter The context of Cardenio
  16. 11. The statue of our queen Shakespeare's open secret
  17. 12. A Winter's Tale
  18. Epilogue Our bending author
  19. Bibliography
  20. Index