Shakespeare And The Politics Of Nostalgia: Negotiating The Memory Of Elizabeth I On The Jacobean Stage

In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited her throne. Even after her death, however, people continued to hark back to Elizabeth, comparing James's reign with his predecessor's. In this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, Yuichi Tsukada demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics behind the nostalgia. Based around close readings of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, the volume traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the memory of Elizabeth. Through this investigation, the book offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama. What was the original significance of the two contentious prophecies – 'none of woman born' and the march of Birnam Wood – in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of Coriolanus?Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse throughout the first decade of James's reign, the impact of this cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare's Jacobean drama has been ignored or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama by focusing on the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England's dead queen.

• | Author: Yuichi Tsukada
• | Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• | Publication Date: Jul 25, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 232 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1350067229
• | ISBN-13: 9781350067226