Friendship studies is one of the fastest growing new fields in Renaissance Literature, and this article attempts to suggest why this might be the case. By discussing friendship's Classical provenance, its pivotal role in humanist textual practice, and fictionalisations of the friendship theme, it provides an overview of the emergence of the concept into the light of the Renaissance period. Yet the article also discusses some of the more revealing critical insights into that literary history. Such insights include the connection between the rhetoric of friendship and the discourse of companionate marriage, anxieties surrounding the public display of male–male affection, and the disruption of friendship by Derridean ‘differance’. The article ends by making reference to the ‘unfriendliness’ with which most people met in their daily lives, and suggests that those conditions might offer one reason why the theme was such a popular one
Arden Shakespeare and Theory provides a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical developments that have dominated Shakespeare studies in recent years, as well as those that are emerging at the present moment. Each volume provides:
a clear definition of a particular theory;a survey of its major theorists and critics;an analysis of its significance in Shakespeare studies;a summary of relevant political, social and economic contexts;a wealth of suggested resources for further investigation.
Reception Theory provides readers with a unique overview and understanding of the ways in which both audiences and readers have reacted to Shakespeare’s works historically and in the present. This study demonstrates how recent emphases on a reader’s and a spectator’s role in the creation of meaning might allow us to contemplate Shakespeare’s work in fresh and often provocative ways. Among the plays included as case studies are A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, The Tempest, King Lear and Henry V. Shakespeare and Reception Theory pays close attention to early modern modes of interaction in the playhouse alongside more recent assumptions that underlie spectating and performing.
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