Ebook: Making make-believe real: politics as theater in Shakespeare's time
- Tags: English drama, English drama--17th century--History and criticism, English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan 1500-1600--History and criticism, Politics and literature, Politics and literature--England--History--16th century, Politics and literature--England--History--17th century, Politics in literature, Power (Social sciences) in literature, History, Criticism interpretation etc, Shakespeare William -- 1564-1616 -- Criticism and interpretation, Elizabeth
- Year: 2015
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- City: England
- Language: English
- epub
Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe's Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth.
Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity's rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the...