Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare's Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

Places Shakespeare and his work in the religious and political context of his own time Provides a new interpretation of the medieval influence on Renaissance plays Examines the connectedness of religion, literature, and art

Autorentext
Alfred Thomas is Professor of English at University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. His most recently published books include The Czech Legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria: The Text and its Context (2024), Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 (2022), The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Art and Literature in the Age of Chaucer and the Gawain Poet (2020), Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages: Maimed Rights (2018), and Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience (2015).

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Maimed Rights in Shakespeare's England.- 2. Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in Medieval Arthurian Romance and Richard II.- 3 . Demonizing the Other: The Prioress's Tale, The Jew of Malta , and The Merchant of Venice .- 4. Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and Hamlet.- 5. Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi , and The Virgin Martyr.- 6. Remember the Porter: Memorializing the Medieval Drama and the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth .- 7. Conclusion: Shakespeare Our Contemporary.