Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage
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€102.99
A01=Peter Womack
Anglo-Spanish war
Author_Peter Womack
Category=DSBC
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
early modern
England
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
rhetoric
the sea
theatre
William Shakespeare
Product details
- ISBN 9781399539494
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Feb 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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).
