This book examines six plays by Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest) as dramatizations of the Renaissance court in its developing history - a history searched by Shakespeare to disclose its most characteristic gains and losses. For these plays do not simply celebrate Tudor and Stuart rule: they scrutinize it too, in the centre of its institutional theatre of power, the court. This book shows how, if the plays came into the court, the court also came into the plays, with its most salient features - its competitiveness, its inner tensions and its contradictions, its language, its cultural life and its entertainments - exposed to the scrutiny of an art-form that proved itself to be a new mode of historical understanding.
- ISBN10 0312046162
- ISBN13 9780312046163
- Publish Date 1 June 1990
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 31 March 2016
- Publish Country US
- Imprint St. Martin's Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 266
- Language English