Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage
The sea for Shakespeare is both a location and a metaphor; and either way it affords him an extraordinary freedom of invention, releasing whatever in the plays is vast, fluid and unceasing. It is also a defining element of his historical context: he lived and worked a few yards from one of the great maritime rivers of the world, and for much of his career England was engaged in a naval war with Spain. So the Shakespearean sea invites two distinct perspectives – poetics and history, the conventional literary symbol and the contingent economic struggle. This book embraces both of them together, tracing the intricate connections between them, and showing how they meet, above all, on the stage. It was in the Elizabethan playhouse that commercial enterprise, physical confinement and boundless rhetoric interacted to generate an imaginative energy whose waves can still be fel.
1145942998
Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage
The sea for Shakespeare is both a location and a metaphor; and either way it affords him an extraordinary freedom of invention, releasing whatever in the plays is vast, fluid and unceasing. It is also a defining element of his historical context: he lived and worked a few yards from one of the great maritime rivers of the world, and for much of his career England was engaged in a naval war with Spain. So the Shakespearean sea invites two distinct perspectives – poetics and history, the conventional literary symbol and the contingent economic struggle. This book embraces both of them together, tracing the intricate connections between them, and showing how they meet, above all, on the stage. It was in the Elizabethan playhouse that commercial enterprise, physical confinement and boundless rhetoric interacted to generate an imaginative energy whose waves can still be fel.
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Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage

Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage

by Peter Womack
Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage

Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage

by Peter Womack

Hardcover

$115.00 
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Overview

The sea for Shakespeare is both a location and a metaphor; and either way it affords him an extraordinary freedom of invention, releasing whatever in the plays is vast, fluid and unceasing. It is also a defining element of his historical context: he lived and worked a few yards from one of the great maritime rivers of the world, and for much of his career England was engaged in a naval war with Spain. So the Shakespearean sea invites two distinct perspectives – poetics and history, the conventional literary symbol and the contingent economic struggle. This book embraces both of them together, tracing the intricate connections between them, and showing how they meet, above all, on the stage. It was in the Elizabethan playhouse that commercial enterprise, physical confinement and boundless rhetoric interacted to generate an imaginative energy whose waves can still be fel.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781399539494
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 02/28/2025
Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Womack is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia, where he taught courses on and around Shakespeare for thirty years. His books include Dialogue (2011), English Renaissance Drama (2006) and Ben Jonson (1986).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Series Editors’ Preface


Introduction
1. The Sea of Genius
2. The Royal Sea
3. The Aristocratic Sea
4. The Mercantile Sea
5. The Rhetorical Sea
6. The Narrative Sea
7. The Invisible Sea
Afterword

Bibliography
Index

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