Subjects of Advice : Drama and Counsel from More to Shakespeare / Ivan Lupić.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lupic, Ivan, Author.

Series:

Published in cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English drama.

Counseling in literature.

Advice in literature.

Subjectivity in literature.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--16th century.

Politics and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (261 pages)

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Subjects of Advice, Ivan Lupić uncovers the rich interconnectedness of dramatic art and the culture of counsel in the early modern period. While counsel was an important form of practical knowledge, with concrete political consequences, it was also an ingrained cultural habit, a feature of obligatory mental, moral, and political hygiene. To be a Renaissance subject, Lupić claims, one had to reckon with the advice of others. Lupić examines this reckoning in a variety of sixteenth-century dramatic contexts. The result is an original account of the foundational role that counsel played in the development of Renaissance drama.Lupić begins by considering the figure of Thomas More, whose influential argument about counsel as a form of performance in Utopia set the agenda for the entire century. Resisting linear narratives and recovering, instead, the simultaneity of radically different kinds of dramatic experience, he shows the vitality of later dramatic engagements with More's legacy through an analysis of the moral interlude staged within Sir Thomas More, a play possibly coauthored by Shakespeare. More also helps explain the complex use of counsel in Senecan drama, from the neo-Latin plays of George Buchanan, discussed in connection with Buchanan's political writings, to the historical tragedies of the mid-sixteenth century.If tyranny and exemplarity are the keywords for early Elizabethan drama of counsel, for the plays of Christopher Marlowe it is friendship. Lupić considers Marlowe's interest in friendship and counsel, most notably in Edward II, alongside earlier dramatic treatments, thus exposing the pervasive fantasy of the ideal counselor as another self. Subjects of Advice concludes by placing King Lear in relation to its dramatic sources to demonstrate Shakespeare's deliberate dispersal of counsel throughout his play. Counsel's customary link to plain and fearless speech becomes in Shakespeare's hands a powerful instrument of poetic and dramatic expression.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Playing Good Counsel

Chapter 2. Counsel's Tyranny

Chapter 3. Governed by Examples

Chapter 4. Vehemently Pressed

Chapter 5. Words Out of Season

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

"Published in cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library".

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780812296433

0812296435

OCLC:

1134075684