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.
| ISBN: | 9781399539494 |
| Publication date: | 28th February 2025 |
| Author: | Peter Womack |
| Publisher: | Edinburgh University Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 216 pages |
| Series: | Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture |
| Genres: |
Classic and pre-20th century plays Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600 Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Literary studies: plays and playwrights |