The Sketch of Age in Shakespeare's Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) (original) (raw)
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Unregarded age': texts and contexts for elderly characters in English renaissance drama, c.1480-1625
2000
This study seeks to provide historical and literary contexts for elderly characters from English play-texts c.1580 to 1625. Its primary aim, from a literary perspective, is to draw attention to the ways that a better understanding of elderly characterisation can enrich the appreciation of much-studied play-texts, and to indicate some interesting features of more obscure ones. Its secondary aim is to suggest the value, for social historians of old age in early modern England, of play-texts as social evidence. I have examined most of the published extant play-texts of the period, and have found approximately 150 of these to be relevant (the most important of these are listed in the Appendix). Because of the problems of handling all aspects of such a large amount of material, I have chosen to consider the plays chiefly as texts to be read, with little reference to their performative aspects. However, I analyse the dramas as literary as well as social documents. Specific plays provide i...
Becoming Youth: Coming of Age in Shakespeare and Marlowe
While studies in Renaissance childhoods, literary and historical, are becoming more prominent, this work has failed to distinguish between children and adolescents, leaving youth, as such, largely unexamined. My project attends not to the children of early modern drama, but to post-pubescent characters in their teen years, and argues that many plays literalize the 're-naissance' of teenagers ('adolescents' or 'youths' in early modern England), reimagining what it meant to be young during a period when discourses surrounding youth were already clearly, yet crudely, defined. This thesis is a historicized analysis of young characters in several plays: Marlowe's Edward II, and Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. I argue that these plays intervene in the standard definitions so frequently applied to teenagers during the early modern period. The perception, on the one hand, of youthful behavior as violent, reckless, and rash was commonplace: Protestant preachers and moralists of the day insisted that young people were naturally prone to sin, rebelliousness, and unruly behavior, and so required strict regulation. On the other hand, optimistic portrayals of youth abounded as well: the age of youth was associated with hope and beauty as often as it was with folly and sin. These dual perspectives were rudimentary types, broadly construed and indiscriminately applied. My dissertation works to account for the presence of highly nuanced, individuated, and agential teenaged figures in the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe in the context of this widespread yet limited perception of youth. The ii literary text, I claim, both participates in and works to disable discourses of youth in the period.
“Cousin, I Am Too Young”: Age and Authority in Shakespeare’s Richard II
Shakespeare, 2019
According to his Lancastrian opponents, the historical Richard II lost his crown primarily due to his excessive youthfulness. This view shaped subsequent accounts of his reign, including Shakespeare's controversial play about him. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second repeatedly addresses the question of the king's age as perceived by, and in relation to, his subjects and political opponents. As my article demonstrates in detail, Shakespeare's characters do not speak of age merely sporadically and in politically neutral ways. Instead, they regularly invoke it as a site of rhetorical contestation, informed by an early modern consensus that defined age largely in practical and social terms, was markedly gerontocratic, and made mature adulthood an important prerequisite to successful governance. Read in this context, i.e., with a focus on the intersection between age and rank as conceptualized by Shakespeare's contemporaries, the various age-related passages in the play reveal both Richard's failure and Bolingbroke's success with regard to their agepolitical self-fashioning.
Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare
This essay argues that Q1 Hamlet represents the earliest version of Shakespeare’s play, written in the late 1580s. The argument builds upon, and for the first time combines, evidence in Terri Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy and Performance (2014) and Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1 (2015). It concentrates on differences between Q1 and the later, expanded, canonical texts of the play, specifically in relation to the age of Hamlet and the Queen. It emphasizes that Hamlet’s age crucially affects the age, sexuality, and political importance of his mother (an issue ignored by male critics). Hamlet’s age has been a factor in performances of the play from Burbage and Betterton in the seventeenth century to 2015 productions of Q1. Why then did Harold Jenkins in 1982 dismiss the importance of Hamlet’s age? To contextualize Jenkins’ dismissal (founded on the principles of both New Criticism and New Bibliography), this essay traces scholarship on the age difference back to the 1870s. It focuses particularly on the conflict between two influential texts: A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) and L.C. Knight’s “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (1933). It also calls attention to neglected details of Thomas Nashe’s 1589 allusion to “whole Hamlets of tragical speaches”: these point to Shakespeare as the author of the 1580s play, and also to specific details found in Q1 but not present in Belleforest’s story of Amleth in Histoires Tragiques.
Bastardy, Betrayal & Ageing: A Gerontological Reading of King Lear
The Creative Launcher, 2024
William Shakespeare's much celebrated play King Lear (1606) deals with socio-political themes revolving around the protagonist Lear who divided his fortunes between his daughters on the basis of their flattery. King Lear is a play which is political in nature and the politics of it lie not only on the kingly position of Lear but also on his role as a father. The play depicts the picture of a state where social, domestic, and filial order has fallen down. The daughters of the old man Lear betray him. The reasons behind their betrayal are significant to explore. For Lear his two daughters’ betrayal lies in their lack of consideration for their father and lust for his money which they have already got, making Lear just a useless man to them now. But on the other hand, Edmund’s betrayal to his father raises questions on the hypocrisy of the social orders of the society which have kept him marginalized because of his status as an illegitimate child in the society. The paper attempts to explore the idea of social order being subverted by bringing forth two of the often-overlooked factors which are extremely crucial in driving the plot of the play. The study ventures into this field through the lenses of marginalized characters of Lear and Gloucester who are betrayed by their children and brings another perspective to this argument by bringing forth the conflicted position of Edmund who has been a victim of his father’s wrong doings. The study primarily uses close reading and textual analysis and theoretically uses Gerontological studies in the socio-political background of Shakespeare’s time and takes it further by examining its traces in the contemporary social scenarios.
The representation of old age is, and has always been, a much contrasted one. Philosophers, writers, painters, film directors, journalists as well as politicians have been portraying old age in an ambiguous way; and this ambiguity seems to have withstood the test of time. Therefore, this paper will delve into the exploration of how aging and the elderly have been portrayed in French literature. Studying old age as a literary theme is another way to understand how the image of the elderly evolved through time in France, and more generally, a powerful tool to understand aging and old age. The paper will assess the ways old age has been and is being represented in French literature; yesterday and nowadays. It will be divided into chronological order; the first part will explore the ways French writers and poets described old age from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Because the 19th century marks an interesting turning point in the consideration of old age, a second part of the paper will be devoted to it. The last part will finally focus on the 20th and 21st centuries’ literary representations of the Elderly.
Reading Shakespeare in the context of his own time
2010
This paper is an attempt to study Shakespeare in the context of his own age. Drawing on critical research in New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, I have attempted to show how the social practices of Elizabethan Age influence the plays. The prevalence of themes relating to politics and finances in the plays are a reflection of the contemporary social issues. I discuss how power and money are represented in Shakespeare‘s plays as well as the way the playwright himself dealt with these two forces. Shakespeare had to negotiate between the rules imposed upon him, by political power and economic necessity, and his desire for artistic autonomy , and this position is inscribed in his plays. Shakespeare, according to Ben Jonson, ―was not of an age, but for all time (l43)‖ 1 . The Shakespearean critic Jan Kott called h im ―Our contemporary‖ in the book by the same name 2 . More recently Shakespeare has become the Man of the Millennium in a BBC poll 3 , winning over scientists and politic...