Full Description
This work searches Shakespeare's history and Roman plays to find the raw materials of English national consciousness and identity. The messages of Shakespeare's history plays are not principally the plots or "facts" of the dramas but the attitudes and imaginings they elicited in audiences. Reading Shakespeare through the lens of national identity is a study almost as old as the plays themselves, and many scholars have found various articulations of nationhood in Shakespeare's plays.
This book argues that Shakespeare's histories furnished modern England with a curriculum for constructing a national identity, a confidence of language and culture, and a powerful new medium through which to communicate and express this negotiated identity. Highlighting the application of semiotics, it studies the playwright's use of symbols, metonymy, symbolic codes, and metaphor. By examining what Shakespeare and playgoers remembered and forgot, as well as the ways ideas were framed, this book explores how a national identity was crafted, contested, and circulated.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Inscribing a Nation: Patriotism, Nationalism,
and National Identity
2. The Kingly Bastard and the Bastardly King:
The Citizens of King John
3. The Making of a King: Prince Hal's Mastery
of Language in Redeeming His Time and Nation
4. Others: Henry V's Shimmering Irishman
and Shakespeare's Spectrum of Exclusion
5. Wonder Women: Joan of Arc, Queen Margaret,
and Gendering in the Three Parts of Henry VI
6. Time: Dream, Myth, and Memory in Richard III
7. Unking'd, Un-Named, and Undone: Erasure in Richard II
8. The Riddle of Cade's Rebellion: Disorder and Populist
Revolt in Henry VI, Part II
9. Tyranny and the Crowd: Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Appropriations of the Roman Past
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index
