Reading Shakespeare Historically

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Routledge, Jul 26, 2005 - Literary Criticism - 224 pages
Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today.
Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from laws of defamation in Othello to the competing loyalties of companionate marriage and male friendship in The Changeling. In doing so she reveals a wealth of new insights, sometimes surprising but always original and engrossing. At the same time, these essays also provide a fascinating account of the rise of feminist scholarship since the 1980s and the diversifying of `new historicist' approaches over the same period.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
Defamation and Desdemonas case
18
Unlawful marriage in Hamlet
34
These are old paradoxes
47
Gender dependency and sexual availability in Twelfth Night
63
Erasmuss familiar letters and Shakespeares King Lear
76
Mercantile exchange and knowledge transactions in Marlowes The Jew of Malta
95
Anxiety for the lineal family in Jacobean drama
111
The scholar of womens history as Penelope among her suitors
129
What happens in Hamlet?
145
NOTES
155
INDEX
202
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About the author (2005)

Lisa Jardine, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, is the director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, the centenary professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She lives with her husband and three children in London.

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