Shakespeare: Out of Court: Dramatizations of Court Society [Hardcover]

This book examines six plays by Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest) as dramatizations of the Renaissance court in its developing history - a history searched by Shakespeare to disclose its most characteristic gains and losses. For these plays do not simply celebrate Tudor and Stuart rule: they scrutinize it too, in the centre of its institutional theatre of power, the court. This book shows how, if the plays came into the court, the court also came into the plays, with its most salient features - its competitiveness, its inner tensions and its contradictions, its language, its cultural life and its entertainments - exposed to the scrutiny of an art-form that proved itself to be a new mode of historical understanding.Introduction; J.Turner - PART 1: THE COURT AND THE NEW LEARNING; J.Turner - Prologue: 'Of Studies' and Play - Love's Labour's Lost: The Court at Play - Hamlet: The Court in Transition (I) - PART 2: IDEALIZED COURTS AND DREAMS OF FREEDOM; N.Potter - Wildness and Wilderness: Alternatives to Courtly Life - As You Like It: The Outlaw Court - Twelfth Night: The Court in Transition (II) - Afterword: 'For the rain it raineth every day' - PART 3: LATE ROMANCES: MAGIC, MAJESTY AND MASQUE; G.Holderness - Introduction: Theatre and Court - The Tempest: Spectacles of Disenchantment - The Winter's Tale: Country into Court - Endgames; G.Holderness - Notes - Index