[PDF] Money And Magic In Early Modern Drama eBook

Author : David Hawkes
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 31,97 MB
Release : 2022-12-01
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1350247057

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Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public theatre was emerging – to great controversy – as the perfect medium to display, analyse and evaluate the newly autonomous power of representation in its financial, magical and aesthetic forms. Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama is especially timely in the current era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which are just as mysterious and occult in their operations as the germinal finance of 16th-century London. Chapters examine the convergence of money and magic in a wide range of early modern drama, from the anonymous Mankind through Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson, concentrating on such plays as The Alchemist, The New Inn and The Staple of News. Several focus on Shakespeare, whose analysis of the relations between finance, witchcraft and theatricality is particularly acute in Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale.

Author : David Hawkes
Publisher :
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 42,2 MB
Release : 2022
Category : English drama
ISBN : 9781350247079

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"This volume considers three powerful ideological forces in early modern England: money, magic and the theatre. With the authorization of usury, financial value was developing into an independent, effective power. The mysterious, invisible nature of money's power struck many contemporaries as magical and contributed to the hysteria behind the great witch-hunts. At the same time, the public theatre emerged as a popular medium well-suited to representing the powers of magic. All the essays in this book examine the convergence of these three forces in a wide range of early modern drama. Part One considers the works of a broad array of figures ranging from Plautus through John Lyly to Christopher Marlowe - discussing plays such as Midas, The Alchemist and The Jew of Malta - while remaining tightly focussed on the nexus of money and magic. While Part Two concentrates on Shakespeare, whose diagnosis of the relations between finance, witchcraft and the stage is particularly acute in plays such as Timon of Athens, The Tempest and A Winter's Tale . The volume is especially timely in the current era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which often seem just as mysterious and occult in their operations as did the burgeoning financial system of sixteenth-century London."--

Author : Nandini Das
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 37,37 MB
Release : 2016-12-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317290674

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This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Author : Professor Lisa Hopkins
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 44,83 MB
Release : 2014-10-28
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 147243286X

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Considering a variety of questions centering on magic and, or in, performance, this volume furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. Collectively the essays show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects and subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to effect transformation in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.

Author : Dr. Shokhan Rasool Ahmed
Publisher : Author House
Page : 103 pages
File Size : 28,54 MB
Release : 2014-09-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1496990498

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Magic and Gender in Early Modern England surveys the history of male and female magic in early modern England and the factors that influenced what writers include in their work regarding magic and witchcraft. the book includes the following: --Three chapters that focus on how Renaissance drama deals with contemporary issues of witchcraft and how witchcraft was used as an element to explore ideas of power and gender in early modern England --Key secondary readings by influential critics --Selected sources and analogues for Shakespeare's Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, Thomas Middleton's the Witch, and the Witch of Edmonton by John Ford, Thomas Dekker, and William Rowley

Author : Hans Christoph Binswanger
Publisher :
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 24,21 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Alchemy in literature
ISBN :

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In Money and Magic, Binswanger elucidates Goethe's remarkable prediction that, following the Industrial Revolution, economic society would be built on the transformation of natural resources into a continually expanding money supply. Yet Goethe also cautioned of the results should modern society exploit these resources and fail in its responsibility to the natural environment. Goethe meant Faust to be a warning to modern economic society.

Author : Anannya Dasgupta
Publisher :
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 47,26 MB
Release : 2011
Category : English drama
ISBN :

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My dissertation interrogates the a priori narrative of decline that informs the study of early modern magic. In recent years, a number of studies have reclaimed magic from its long relegated location of obscurity and irrelevance to early modernity. In spite of this surge of interest, magic continues to be seen as eccentric in the least and as abstraction at most. What is still missing from early modern studies is the sense that magic was as prevalent a discourse in the seventeenth century as science is to the twentieth. Recent historical and historicist work on early modern science invariably make cautious distinctions between early modern science and current day scientific discourse in a salutary nod to early modern magic. In my work I argue for the necessity of a more prominent discussion of magic as magic: as literal and persistent systems of knowledge and praxis that animated social and intellectual spaces by engaging and resisting systematic suppression. Such a reading of magic in dramatic works of canonical English authors as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton reveals very different stakes for both magic and early modernity. The magic in Doctor Faustus is embedded in Christian theodicy; Marlowe uses the Faustian pact with the devil to allude to traditions of knowledge outside Judeo-Christianity and subverts the cautionary tale by making it a tragic play. Shakespeare's The Tempest narrates a shift from demonic magic to the magic of theatrical mechanics and leaves the spectators with a less settled conclusion than is usually read in the play. Given the shifting parameters of magical practice, the credibility of magic is subject to considerable scrutiny. Such a scrutiny of the socio-economics of belief is motivated by fraudulent magic in The Alchemist. The dissertation concludes with the aesthetic synthesis of Christian and magical thought in Milton's A Masque at Ludlow Castle.

Author : Philip Butterworth
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 10,77 MB
Release : 2005-10-06
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780521825139

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An original investigation into conjuring tricks and stage magic on the medieval stage.

Author : Natasha Korda
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 50,10 MB
Release : 2016-02-11
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1134783043

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Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.