Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance

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Manchester University Press, 2004 - Drama - 326 pages
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.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
3
Wrapped in a players hide Shakespeares secret history
12
Ghostly fathers Shakeshafte and the Jesuits
46
Secret as a dumb man Two comedies of Italy and the genesis of secrecy
73
No news but the old news Shakespeare and the tragedy of Arden
106
A bloody question The politics of Venus and Adonis
128
Love in idleness The stripping of the altars in A Midsummer Nights Dream
146
Dyed in mummy Othello and the mulberries
157
Voyage to Tunis New history and the old world of The Tempest
208
Unseasonable laughter The context of Cardenio
232
The statue of our queen Shakespeares open secret
248
A Winters tale King Lear in the Pennines
273
Epilogue
296
Bibliography
303
Index
321
Copyright

The pilots thumb Macbeth and the martyrs
188

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About the author (2004)

Richard Wilson is Professor of Renaissance Literature in the Department of English at the University of Lancaster

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