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"MacFaul, Tom"
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Problem fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama
\"Fathers are central to the drama of Shakespeare's time: they are revered, even sacred, yet they are also flawed human beings who feature as obstacles in plays of all genres. In Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, Tom MacFaul examines how fathers are paradoxical and almost anomalous characters on the English Renaissance stage. Starting as figures of confident authority in early Elizabethan drama, their scope for action becomes gradually more restricted, until by late Jacobean drama they have accepted the limitations of their power. MacFaul argues that this process points towards a crisis of patriarchal authority in wider contemporary culture. While Shakespeare's plays provide a key insight into these shifts, this book explores the dramatic culture of the period more widely to present the ways in which Shakespeare's work differed from that of his contemporaries while both sharing and informing their artistic and ideological preoccupations\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Shakespeare and the natural world
\"Exploring the rich range of meanings that Shakespeare finds in the natural world, this book fuses ecocritical approaches to Renaissance literature with recent thinking about the significance of religion in Shakespeare's plays. MacFaul offers a clear introduction to some of the key problems in Renaissance natural philosophy and their relationship to Reformation theology, with individual chapters focusing on the role of animals in Shakespeare's universe, the representation of rural life, and the way in which humans' consumption of natural materials transforms their destinies. These discussions enable powerful new readings of Shakespeare's plays, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, and the history plays. Proposing that Shakespeare's representation of the relationship between man and nature anticipated that of the Romantics, this volume will interest scholars of Shakespeare studies, Renaissance drama and literature, and ecocritical studies of Shakespeare\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Changing Meaning of Love-Triangle Plots in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama
A classic example of comforting friendship can be found in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589, pub. 1594), which sets up a triangular opposition between friendship, paternal duty and romantic love, offering one comic and one tragic outcome, but it is not very systematic in doing so.7 The magnanimity of the protagonist Prince Edward in giving Margaret, the fair maid of Fresingfield, to his friend Lacy guarantees a comic outcome to his plot, and avoids strife with his father, the King, who wants to marry him off to Eleanor of Castile; Lacy is able to act as a kind of erotic proxy for his friend, satisfying his private desires while his public duties are also carried through. Late Jacobean tragicomic competition When love-triangle plots re-emerge in the 1610s, the plots become all the more contrived, as masculine honour is more fully asserted.15 The relative value for a young man of love, friendship and filial duty is a persistent concern of earlier Jacobean plays, even when love-triangle plots are not prominent;16 but the fullest and most artful development comes in Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas (c. 1611, pub. 1647).17 Here, Valentine has lost his son, but has acquired a much-loved younger friend, Francis, who duly falls in love with Valentine's fiancée Cellide (who is also his ward); in the ensuing love-triangle plot all three try desperately to outdo one another in behaving honourably, but what differentiates this from standard versions of the friendship-rivalry plot is that Francis turns out to be Valentine's lost son; the play thus turns into a father-son rivalry plot. Perhaps anticipating the new vertical worldview, Shakespeare in Hamlet seems to have found a new mode of supportive, advisory male bonding without sexual rivalry, and he pushes this onward in plays like All's Well and Cymbeline.26 This period is also concluded by Shakespeare, whose Winter's Tale reintroduces new mature rivalries between the long-term friends Leontes and Polixenes, where fears of marital infidelity appear as monstrous as ever; Two Noble Kinsmen then, in turn, acts as a major catalyst for a new kind of honourable rivalry, where two friends can retain mutual respect even as they insist on their amorous rights in their competition over Emilia. [...]friendship seems in some sense to cool: there is no reunion between Claudio and Lucio.
Journal Article
Friendship in Sidney’s Arcadia s
This essay explores friendship in both versions of the Arcadia , arguing not only that Sir Philip Sidney’s romance is the fullest and most successful narrative development of the humanist ideal of friendship, but also that this ideal is therein stretched to its limits, particularly in the revised version of the text. Friendship tempers justice, as grace transcends law, but the oppositions cannot be simply resolved.
Journal Article
Friendship in Sidney's \Arcadias\
This essay explores friendship in both versions of the Arcadia, arguing not only that Sir Philip Sidney's romance is the fullest and most successful narrative development of the humanist ideal of friendship, but also that this ideal is therein stretched to its limits, particularly in the revised version of the text. Friendship tempers justice, as grace transcends law, but the oppositions cannot be simply resolved.
Journal Article
The butterfly, the fart and the dwarf: the origins of the English laureate micro-epic
[...]Achilles' shield was really decorative rather than protective (his protection coming from being dipped-imperfectly-in the Styx),12 and the armour likewise does Clarion no good; the point of the reference to Achilles (killed by a heel-wound), along with the fact that Clarion is armed everywhere but his legs, may be to remind us that Philip Sidney died because he wore no leg armour in the skirmish at Zutphen.13 It also ironically raises the proverbial defencelessness of the butterfly in its journey to heaven.14 Decorative and futile though this armour may be, its substance is pure, the art that made it is at least the equal of Vulcan's-because it is God's. [...]Ms shinie wings as siluer bright, Painted with thousand colours, passing farre All Painters skill, he did about him dight: Spenser is playing with these ideas rather seriously, not least in his apostrophe to Cupid: he is, of course, praising one who resembles that god's own beloved, but the apology also resembles his apologies to the Queen for praising his own mistress in Amoretti 80, and for the praise of Colin Clout's mistress in The Faerie Queene: Sunne of the world, great glory of the sky, That all the earth doest Ughten with thy rayes, Great Gloriam, greatest Maiesty, Pardon thy shepheard, mongst so many layes, As he hath sung of thee in all his dayes, To make one minime of thy poore handmayd, And vnderneath thy feete to place her prayse, That when thy glory shall be farre displayd To future age of her this mention may be made. [...]the Queen's own provocations to Charles's honour may have been the final spark that kindled the powder-keg of the first Civil War: she is supposed to have prompted him to arrest Pym, Hampden, Mandeville and others by saying \"Go, you coward, and pull these rogues out by the ears, or never see my face more.
Journal Article
The childish love of Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville
According to a conventional and oft-cited image from Isaiah (49:23), \"Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers.\" [...]she in chafe him from her lap did shove, Brake bow, brake shafts, while Cupid weeping sate: [...]that his grandame Nature pittying it, Of Stella\" s browes made him two better bowes, And in her eyes of arrowes infinit. In the Arcadia, Sidney's Pyrocles/Zelmane/Cleophila considers the childishness of love and of Love: This is thy work, thou god forever blind; Though thousands old, a boy entitled still. [...]children do the silly birds they find With stroking hurt, and too much cramming kill.35 The lines stand as an implicit (though not intended) rebuke to the eavesdropping Basilius, an old man made childish by love; the seventeen-year-old Pyrocles is more licensed to be a lover than the old ruler. The integrity of the self is put in doubt by this, because it feels like changeability, but this is at least partly challenged by the Spenserian pseudo-etymology of mountains, which provides a sense that movement is in some sense permissible to that which is truly great. Since even mountains move (though so slowly we do not see them-like the movement of the earth round the sun?), the line might be compared to the \"trepidation of the spheres\" in Donne's \"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.\"
Journal Article
