Secret Shakespeare Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance

by Wilson, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780719070259
• ISBN10: 0719070252
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-03
• Publisher: MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Summary

Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the last century. InSecret Shakespeare, Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived. Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a "golden time" of future toleration, "What's to come" is always unsure. Whether or not "He died a papist," it is because we can never "pluck out the heart" of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist. This is essential reading for all scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies.

Author Biography

Richard Wilson is Professor of Renaissance Literature in the Department of English at the University of Lancaster.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Note on texts	x
Introduction	1	(229)
1 Wrapped in a player's hide
Shakespeare's secret history	10	(34)
2 Ghostly fathers
Shakeshafte and the Jesuits	44	(27)
3 Secret as a dumb man
Two comedies of Italy and the genesis of secrecy	71	(33)
4 No news but the old news
Shakespeare and the tragedy of Arden	104	(22)
5 A bloody question
The politics of Venus and Adonis	126	(18)
6 Love in idleness
The stripping of the altars in A Midsummer Night's Dream	144	(11)
7 Dyed in mummy
Othello and the mulberries	155	(31)
8 The pilot's thumb
Macbeth and the martyrs	186	(20)
9 Voyage to Tunis
New history and the old world of The Tempest	206	(24)
10 Unseasonable laughter
The context of Cardenio	230	(16)
11 The statue of our queen
Shakespeare's open secret	246	(25)
12 A Winter's tale
King Lear in the Pennines	271	(23)
Epilogue	294	(7)
Bibliography	301	(18)
Index	319