The Dramatist and the Received Idea

A critical account of seven plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he takes pains to analyse the context in which the plays were written.

Sanders (Author)

9780521298001, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 15 May 1980

400 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.3 cm, 0.51 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Mr Sanders writes intelligently, and his aim, to reconcile historical and purely critical approaches to the drama, is splendid.' Review of English Studies

Dr Sanders' book grew out of uneasiness over commonly accepted ways of talking about Elizabethan literature. Phrases like 'world picture', 'received ideas' are so easily used that we bypass important questions: A picture of whose word? Ideas received by whom? and in what way? The heart of Dr Sanders' book is a critical account of seven plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare (The Massacre at Paris, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Dr Faustus, Richard II, Richard III and Macbeth). In his examination, Dr Sanders is at pains to analyse the nature of the intellectual and cultural environment in which the plays were written, to define the ways in which this environment influenced Marlowe and Shakespeare and thus to come to a full understanding of the manner in which a work of art can be simultaneously 'of an age' and 'for all time'.

A note on editions
Preface
1. Literature as history: with some questions about 'historical imagination'
2. Dramatist as jingoist: The Massacre at Paris
3. Dramatist as realist: the Jew of Malta
4. Machiavelli and the crisis of Renaissance political consciousness
5. Providence and policy in Richard III
6. Providence and history in Elizabethan thought
7. History without morality: Edward II
8. Shakespearean history: critique of 'Elizabethan policy'
9. Shakespeare's political agnosticism: Richard II
10. Supernature and demonism in Elizabethan thought
11. The new wine and the old bottles: Doctor Faustus
12. Marlowe and the Calvinist doctrine of reprobation
13. 'An unknown fear': The Tragedie of Macbeth
14. Macbeth and the theology of evil
15. Artist and ethos
Appendices
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]