Church and state during Shakespeare's lifetime were in significant conflict on issues stemming from Henry VIII's break with Rome, issues centering principally on questions of authority and obedience - religious conformity, the form of church government, the jurisdiction of spiritual and temporal courts, and the source and scope of the monarch's power. To what extent were these disputes present in Shakespeare's work?In her compelling reassessment of Shakespeare's historicity, Donna Hamilton rejects the notion that the official censorship of the day prevented the stage from representing contemporary debates concerning the relations among church, state, and individual. She argues instead that throughout his career Shakespeare positioned his writing politically and ideologically in relation to the ongoing and changing church-state controversies and in ways that have much in common with the shifts on these issues identified with the Leicester-Sidney-Essex-Southampton-Pembroke group.In her readings of King John, Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, Hamilton finds Shakespeare reappropriating a wide range of idioms from church-state discourse, particularly those of anti-catholicism and nonconformity. And she uses this language to broach some of the broad social and political issues involving obedience, privacy, property, and conscience - matters that were often the focus of church-state disputes and that provided this historical period with its central rhetorics of subjectivity.In this first full-scale study of Shakespeare and church politics, Hamilton also provides an important reassessment of censorship practices, of the means by which dissident views circulated, of the centrality of anti-catholic discourse for all church-state debates, and of the overwhelming significance of church-state issues as an agent for print and stage.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England

Hamilton, Donna B.

Literature & Fiction

The University Press of Kentucky

Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633

In this new study, Donna B. Hamilton offers a major revisionist reading of the works of Anthony Munday, one of the most prolific authors of his time, who wrote and translated in many genres, including polemical religious and political tracts, poetry, chivalric romances, history of Britain, history of London, drama, and city entertainments. Long dismissed as a hack who wrote only for money, Munday is here restored to his rightful position as an historical figure at the centre of many important political and cultural events in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633, Hamilton reinterprets Munday as a writer who began his career writing on behalf of the Catholic cause and subsequently negotiated for several decades the difficult terrain of an ever-changing Catholic-Protestant cultural, religious, and political landscape. She argues that throughout his life and writing career Munday retained his Catholic sensibility and occasionally wrote dangerously on behalf of Catholics. Thus he serves as an excellent case study through which present-day scholars can come to a fuller understanding of how a person living in this turbulent time in English history - eschewing open resistance, exile or martyrdom - managed a long and prolific writing career at the centre of court, theatre, and city activities but in ways that reveal his commitment to Catholic political and religious ideology. Individual chapters in this book cover Munday's early writing, 1577-80; his writing about the trial and execution of Jesuit Edmund Campion; his writing for the stage, 1590-1602; his politically inflected translations of chivalric romance; and his writings for and about the city of London, 1604-33. Hamilton revisits and revalues the narratives told by earlier scholars about hack writers, the anti-theatrical tracts, the role of the Earl of Oxford as patron, the political-religious interests of Munday's plays, the implications of Mu

Biographies & Memoirs

Routledge

Dramas & Plays

Virgil and The Tempest offers a new assessment of the art and politics of Shakespeare's comic masterpiece by examining its relationship to both the contemporary political context and to Virgil's Aeneid. Challenging the view that The Tempest supports the absolutist theories and policies of King James I, Donna Hamilton instead shows how the play represents an argument for a limited monarchy.  Virgil and James I each represent a set of symbols and idioms that Shakespeare appropriates for his own use in The Tempest. In the process, he pays homage to their respective eminence and brings them into dialogical relation with each other, changing the language to suit his purposes. This means rewriting the Aeneid to suit a new time and situation, and it means subtly altering the king's language to present a strong argument for constitutionalism.  Scholars who have emphasized the "transcendent" Shakespeare have sometimes failed to recognize the playwright's passion for resistance, a passion nowhere more cunningly present than in The Tempest.  Hamilton analyzes Shakespeare's practice of rhetorical imitation in The Tempest by comparing him to other Renaissance imitators of Virgil. She also considers three contemporary political issues-the situation of the royal children, the 1610 parliamentary debates on royal prerogative, and the colonization projects in Virginia and Ireland-and their bearing on the play. The result is a fresh contribution to the current interest in Shakespeare's relationship to the courts of Elizabeth I and James I.  Donna Hamilton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Virgil and the Tempest: The Politics of Imitation

Ohio State Univ Pr

<p>In this new study, Donna B. Hamilton offers a major revisionist reading of the works of Anthony Munday, one of the most prolific authors of his time, who wrote and translated in many genres, including polemical religious and political tracts, poetry, chivalric romances, history of Britain, history of London, drama, and city entertainments. Long dismissed as a hack who wrote only for money, Munday is here restored to his rightful position as an historical figure at the centre of many important political and cultural events in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633, Hamilton reinterprets Munday as a writer who began his career writing on behalf of the Catholic cause and subsequently negotiated for several decades the difficult terrain of an ever-changing Catholic-Protestant cultural, religious, and political landscape. She argues that throughout his life and writing career Munday retained his Catholic sensibility and occasionally wrote dangerously on behalf of Catholics. Thus he serves as an excellent case study through which present-day scholars can come to a fuller understanding of how a person living in this turbulent time in English history - eschewing open resistance, exile or martyrdom - managed a long and prolific writing career at the centre of court, theatre, and city activities but in ways that reveal his commitment to Catholic political and religious ideology. Individual chapters in this book cover Munday's early writing, 1577-80; his writing about the trial and execution of Jesuit Edmund Campion; his writing for the stage, 1590-1602; his politically inflected translations of chivalric romance; and his writings for and about the city of London, 1604-33. Hamilton revisits and revalues the narratives told by earlier scholars about hack writers, the anti-theatrical tracts, the role of the Earl of Oxford as patron, the political-religious interests of Munday's plays, the implications of Mu</p>

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hamilton, Donna B.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hamilton, Donna B.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hamilton, Donna B.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England

Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633

Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England

Virgil and the Tempest: The Politics of Imitation

Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633