Maurice Hunt

The winter's tale : critical essays

A collection that includes a lengthy introduction describing historical trends in critical interpretations and theatrical performances of Shakespeares play; 20 essays on the play, including two written especially for this volume (by Maurice Hunt and David Bergeron).

Shakespeare's religious allusiveness : its play and tolerance

Shakespeares Religious Allusiveness complicates debates about whether Shakespeares plays are fundamentally Protestant or Catholic in sympathy, challenging analyses that either find Protestant elements consistently undercutting Catholic motifs or, less often, discover evidence of the playwrights endorsement of Catholic doctrine and customs. Rather, Maurice Hunt argues that Shakespeares syncretistic method of incorporating both Protestant and Catholic elements into his plays was singular among early modern English playwrights at a time when governmental and social tolerance of Protestantism in the theatre was high and criticism of stereotyped Catholicism was correspondingly rampant in drama.

Approaches to teaching Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

As one ofShakespeares most popular and accessible plays, Romeo andJuliet is an excellent choice for inclusion in the MLA Approaches to Teaching series. The diversity of interpretations in this volume illustrates the richness and complexity of a play too often seen as simply a tale of fate and star-crossed lovers, and the essays challenge this traditional reading ofRomeo andJuliet as the greatest love story ever. Furthermore, the broad cross-section of material is suitable for a range of classroom environments, from middle school through college, small seminars to statewide telecourses.

Qualifying the Good Steward of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens

In this late tragedy of Shakespeare’s, good and questionable service intersect in the character of Timon’s steward, Flavius. If we gauge the dramatic importance of a Shakespeare character by his or her share of the total lines of a play, Flavius is no insignificant figure but the third most apparent character in Timon of Athens. After Timon (obviously) and Apemantus (9.9%), Flavius speaks 8.6% of the play’s lines, a percentage greater than that of Alcibiades (6.6%). Flavius’s major soliloquy does reveal a mind capable of probing, complex analysis (4.2.31-52). Playgoers and critics alike, taking their cue from Timon, often identify Flavius as the one good man in a corrupt ancient society. The misanthrope Timon himself late in act 4 calls Flavius ‘Thou singly honest man’ (4.3.528).What has not been remarked, however, is Shakespeare’s subtle but extensive qualification throughout the play of Flavius’s service. Measured against the standard set by certain servants in plays roughly contemporary with Timon of Athens, Flavius’s service, contrary to established critical opinion, fails to represent a relatively ideal Shakespeare composite. Fully understanding my argument entails preliminary reconstruction of this composite from plays written most likely just before and after Timon of Athens. As regards Shakespeare’s depiction of service, King Lear amounts to a watershed for the plays that follow it. In this massive tragedy, we see good and bad service memorably dramatized on both a large and small scale. On the large scale, Kent and Oswald square off, with Kent on the one hand loyally serving Lear by risking the loss of his position and banishment in order to describe for his master, when no one else will, the self-destructiveness entailed in his game

Reformation/counter-reformation Macbeth

In the past, commentators interested in early modern religious issues in Macbeth usually stressed the tragedy’s anti-Catholic elements and corresponding Reformation Protestant traits. Nevertheless, any Reformation Protestant reading of Macbeth must contend with the undercutting of this reading by an entailed consequent emphasis— hitherto unnoted—upon certain Counter-Reformation Catholic motifs. This entailed, subtle dramatic endorsement of Catholic values is surprising in a play sensationally alluding to Jesuits and the Gunpowder Plot, one thus involved in the anti-Catholic hysteria provoked by this horrific attempt upon the lives of King James and his Parliamentarians. My excuse for first presenting specific, sometimes familiar Protestant readings of elements of Macbeth lies in new interpretations of some of them, or new additions to established interpretations of some of them, that as a group set up—or prepare for—the Catholic motifs and allusions that I describe subsequently qualifying or overturning them. Following this procedure is necessary for speculating about the significance in Macbeth of a dramatic method and substance of what might be called a hybrid ‘‘Protestant/Catholic’’ artistry in an officially Protestant England. In the course of this argument, I re-describe and reposition in the play a familiar Shakespearean tragic preoccupation with a character who conforms to the early modern English dramatic profile of the scourge of God. In the case of Macbeth, it proves to be not the title figure—but Macduff. Whatever originality my paper possesses depends upon first traversing briefly the ground of certain anti-Catholic readings of Macbeth. In the autumn of 1605, a group of radical English Roman Catholics had become convinced that King James would not mollify harsh Elizabethan edicts against Catholics, but that he appeared headed toward treatment of them as, or even more harsh than, the persecution meted out by Elizabeth and her officers. Consequently, in November of that year, they plotted, purportedly along with Jesuits in England, to hide barrels of gunpowder in the basement of Parliament and blow up James and those members not secretly warned away. From the overtones of certain language in an intercepted letter to a member warned away, James claimed later that he divinely intuited not simply a plot but also the place and method of destruction. A copy of a Jesuit document, A Treatise of

Cobbling Souls in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

pening speeches of Shakespeare’s plays sometimes include allusions to certain Christian ideas important for appreciating a characterization or a later motif. In 1 Henry IV, for example, the titular monarch focuses his guilty desire to redirect the aggression of Englishmen embroiled in the civil war occasioned by his kingship into a crusade to free Jerusalem from pagan rule. Readers – if not auditors – of this speech, in which King Henry styles himself a soldier of Christ (I.1.18-20), gather the depth of Henry’s desire to atone for sin not only from his mentioning “those blessed feet / Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed / For our advantage to the bitter cross” (25-27), but also from the fact that his speech numbers thirty-three lines of poetry. “Thirty-three is traditionally the age of Christ at his death”, David Daniell notes in the 1998 Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.1 This tradition reflects an emphasis on the Christian symbolism of the number three. Christ’s three-year ministry and death after thirty years of life, among other things, stresses the Trinitarian mystery of three-in-one and one-in-three. Multiplied together, the two digits of 33 equal 9, the Trinity thrice over. King Henry IV expresses his desire to atone for sin in a poetic utterance in which the number of lines equals the number of years Christ is traditionally supposed to have lived – his presence on earth making atonement possible. Steve Sohmer has argued that an allusion to Christ’s supposed age at the time of his crucifixion occurs in Julius Caesar, when Octavius reports that Cassius, Brutus, and the other conspirators gave Caesar’s body thirty-three mortal wounds (V.1.5154).2 Plutarch, in his “Life of Iulius Caesar” (as recorded in Shakespeare’s dramatic source Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Englished by Sir Thomas North), claims that Caesar had twenty-three wounds when he was assassinated.3 Shakespeare, through this change, shows an awareness of the legendary association of Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ.4 For Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries, the fact that both men’s names begin with the same initials – “JC” – supernaturally underscored this association,5 most memorably drawn in the Inferno, where Dante places Cassius and Brutus next to Judas Iscariot in Satan’s mouth at the centre of Hell.6 That Shakespeare should have his Julius Caesar stabbed to death at the ninth hour (II.4.23), the hour of the crucifixion, is thus not surprising.7 I want to do more here than simply confirm what many commentators – most notably David Kaula, Marshall Bradley, and Sohmer – have previously noted: that Christian values inform Shakespeare’s depiction of a famous moment in ancient Rome’s history.8 In what follows, I shall be suggesting that Shakespeare’s association of Caesar and Christ is at times a positive rather than a uniformly parodic relationship,9 and I do so by starting with some unexplored Christian overtones in minor characters’ play-opening dialogue, talk partly concerned with “cobbling souls”. This phrase becomes important later in the play, when Julius Caesar precipitates soul cobbling – the fabricating or mending of souls – among Romans touched in some way by his revolutionary presence, both in the flesh and then in spirit. While this pagan soulmaking is imperfect (as the word “cobbling” implies), it acquires Christian resonance when Brutus and Cassius forge a soulful brotherhood in the urgency of having to react to Caesar’s mobilizing spirit. Brutus and Cassius’s soulcobbling represents the culmination of a concept introduced lightly by a cobbler in Act I, Scene 1. Two Roman Tribunes, Murellus and Flavius, open the play by asking two Plebeians to identify themselves through their crafts. After they learn that the first is a carpenter, Murellus asks the second: “what trade are you”?

Emulation on the Shakespearean Stage

overt, if unacknowledged, tactic of commonplacing” (p. 144). Appendix D, while unrelated to the “maximizing” of Montaigne, may be the most valuable of all: a “Census of Extant Seventeenth-Century Copies of Florio’s Montaigne”. The final chapter, an afterword, explores “English readership in the wake of the Essayes” and summarizes the book’s journey—one which has tracked Montaigne’s English journey. Beginning with Florio, English reader-travellers “did their writerly best to ensure that the Essays would always be received in a spirit of open and alert regard” (p. 173). One of the many virtues of this book is that Hamlin both historicizes this journey and continues it—with his readings and, he generously implies, our readings as well.

Bertram, the Third Earl of Southampton, and Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well: A Speculative Psychosexual Biography

Abstract The resemblance between certain character traits and details of the life of Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton, and aspects of Shakespeares portrayal of Bertram in Alls Well That Ends Well is more intriguing than commentators noting this resemblance have shown. By darkening Bertrams traits in comparison to those of his counterpart, Beltramo, in the plays source in a tale in Boccaccios Decameron, Shakespeare darkened the similar character of Southampton. Certain passages in Shakespeares Sonnets and in plays such as King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winters Tale illuminate this hypothesized negative perspective on the Earl. Tracing these references constructs a speculative psychosexual biography of Shakespeare, in which Southampton plays a role that complicates interpretation not only of Bertrams character but also of the notorious bed trick of Alls Well with its implications of spiritual — if not literal — adultery. The unique representation of the bed trick in this dark comedy may have served a momentary purpose of assuaging the playwrights assumed guilt for having likely committed the sin of adultery recorded in the Sonnets.

Standing in Rich Place: The Importance of Context in The Winter's Tale

When Isabel Archer surprises Madam Merle and Gilbert Osmund in a drawing room, she intuits an abruptly imposed silence.1 Considered by itself, the stillness is not remarkable. It is Madame Merles standing by the fireplace while Osmund lounges in a deep chair that makes the silence so suggestive. This unusual tableau first causes Isabel to suspect that her husbands and friends relationship may be more familiar than she imagined. Often in Jamess novels, social contexts or more precisely, violations of them give statements, and even silences, their special imports. Every reader has his or her favorite scenes demonstrating the importance of context for meaning; examples might be multiplied indefinitely. By identifying the different contexts which an author imposes upon his or her characters, their speeches, and episodes in general, we are obviously aided in interpreting a novel or play. This observation especially applies to Shakespeares The Winters Tale.2 The Ceres-Persephone myth, the conventions of Renaissance pastoral, the Last Judgment, the Christian souls pilgrimage to salvation, the Art versus Nature debate these are only a few of the topics that supply contexts for the evaluation of a

Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics

The editors have organized the twelve essays of this volume into three parts: Shakespeare and Classical Ethics, Shakespeare and Christian Ethics, and Shakespeare and the Ethical Thinking of Montaig...