Hamlet's moment : drama and political knowledge in early modern England / András Kiséry.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kiséry, András, author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English drama--17th century--Political aspects.

English drama.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Hamlet.

Shakespeare, William.

Politics in literature.

Politicians in literature.

Physical Description:

viii, 324 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016.

Summary:

Hamlet's Moment identifies a turning point in the history of English drama and early modern political culture: the moment when the business of politics became a matter of dramatic representation. Drama turned from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. Tragedies of state turned into tragedies of state servants, inviting the public to consider politics as a profession-to imagine what it meant to have a political career. By staging intelligence derived from diplomatic sources, and by inflecting the action and discourse of their plays with a Machiavellian style of political analysis, playwrights such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use in claiming social distinction. In Hamlet's moment, the public stage created the political competence that enabled the rise of the modern public sphere. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : Hamlet's moment

I. Hamlet and the profession of politics. 'The wiser sort' : the distinction of politics and Gabriel Harvey's Machiavellian Hamlet ; Some travellers return : diplomatic writing, political careers, and the world of Hamlet ; 'I lack advancement' : political agents and political servants in Hamlet's moment

II. Political knowledge and the public stage in Hamlet's moment. 'Vile and vulgar admirations' : Chapman and the public of political news ; 'The most matter with best conceyt' : the publics of Tacitean observation and the margins of politics in Jonson's Sejanus ; 'For discourse's sake merely' : political conversation on the stage and off.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-318) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780198746201

0198746202

OCLC:

944434711