Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance

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University of Chicago Press, 1995 - History - 222 pages
Katharine Eisaman Maus explores Renaissance writers' uneasy preoccupation with the inwardness and invisibility of truth. The perceived discrepancy between a person's outward appearance and inward disposition, she argues, deeply influenced the ways English Renaissance dramatists and poets conceived of the theater, imagined dramatic characters, and reflected upon their own creativity.

Reading works by Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton in conjuction with sectarian polemics, gynecological treatises, and accounts of criminal prosecutions, Maus delineates unexplored connections among religious, legal, sexual, and theatrical ideas of inward truth. She reveals what was at stake—ethically, politically, epistemologically, and theologically—when a writer in early modern England appealed to the difference between external show and interior authenticity. Challenging the recent tendency to see early modern selfhood as defined in wholly public terms, Maus argues that Renaissance dramatists continually payed homage to aspects of inner life they felt could never be manifested onstage.

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Contents

MACHIAVELS AND FAMILY
35
OTHELLO AND THE CRIME OF INTENTION
104
JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE
128
CONCLUSION
210
INDEX
217
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About the author (1995)

Elizabeth D. Harvey is assistant professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. Katharine Eisaman Maus, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind.