Being and having in Shakespeare / Katharine Eisaman Maus.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 1955-

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Oxford Wells Shakespeare lectures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation.

Shakespeare, William.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.

Criticism and interpretation.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600--History and criticism.

English drama.

Property in literature.

Physical Description:

141 pages ; 21 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Summary:

What is the relation between who a person is, and what He or she has? A number of Shakespeare's plays engage with this question, elaborating a 'poetics of property' centering on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, and of the different opportunities afforded by access to land and to chattel property. Being and Having in Shakespeare considers these presentations of ownership and authority. Richard II and the Hairy IV plays construe sovereignty as a form of property right, largely construing imperium, or the authority over persons in a polity, as a form of dominium, the authority of the property holder. Nonetheless, what property means changes considerably from Richard's reign to Henry's, as the imagined world of the plays is reconfigured to include an urban economy of chattel consumables. The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and Henry IV, part 1, reimagines, in comic terms, some of the same issues broached in the history plays. It focuses in particular on the problem of the daughter's inheritance and on the different property obligations among kin, friends, business associates, and spouses. In the figure of the 'vagabond king', theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, Henry VI, part 2 and King Lear both coordinate problems of entitlement with conundrums about distributive justice, raising fundamental questions about property relations and social organization. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Being and Having in Richard II 1

2 Prodigal Princes: Land and Chattels in the Second Tetralogy 39

3 Heirs and Affines in The Merchant of Venice 59

4 The Properties of Friendship in The Merchant of Venice 75

5 Vagabond Kings: Entitlement and Distribution in 2 Henry VI and King Lear 99.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [133]-138) and index.

ISBN:

9780199698004

0199698007

OCLC:

809032360