Exile defines the Shakespearean canon, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Two Noble Kinsmen . This book traces the influences on the drama of exile, examining the legal context of banishment (pursued against Catholics, gypsies and vagabonds) in early modern England; the self-consciousness of exile as an amatory trope; and the discourses by which exile could be reshaped into comedy or tragedy. Across genres, Shakespeare's plays reveal a fascination with exile as the source of linguistic crisis, shaped by the utterance of that word 'Banished'.

Autorentext

JANE KINGSLEY-SMITH completed her PhD at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, and is now Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Hull. She has published a number of articles on Shakespeare and on his representation in film, and her wider research interests include the eighteenth-century novel and the works of Iris Murdoch.

Zusammenfassung
'Banished!': the word resounds throughout the Shakespearean canon from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Tempest, yet the theme of exile in Shakespeare's plays has been largely neglected. Regardless of Shakespeare's own status as an exile, banishment was a highly visible condition in Early Modern England, enforced by the law against Catholics, gypsies and beggars and threatened against both the theatres and acting companies for which Shakespeare wrote. It was also explicitly theatrical, inspiring the performance of some new identity through the adoption of disguise or a new name, and often shaped by famous literary exiles such as Seneca, Ovid and Petrarch. Indeed, exile was consistently rewritten throughout the Early Modern period as a tragic, even mortal, blow, as a heroic and religious vocation, and as a journey taken for pleasure and profit. Shakespeare dramatizes these transformations in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, King Lear and Coriolanus. But perhaps his most obsessive concern, and the main focus of this book, is the possibility of language in exile and the victims' emotional and linguistic response to that word - 'Banished!'

Inhalt

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction That One Word "Banishèd": Linguistic Crisis in Romeo and Juliet 'Still-Breeding Thoughts': Richard II and the Exile's Creative Failure Historical-Pastoral Exile in Henry IV 'Hereafter, in a Better World Than This': The End of Exile in As You Like It and King Lear Coriolanus : The Banishment of Rome 'A World Elsewhere': Magic, Colonialism and Exile in The Tempest Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index