Overview

The sea for Shakespeare is both a location and a metaphor; and either way it affords him an extraordinary freedom of invention, releasing whatever in the plays is vast, fluid and unceasing. It is also a defining element of his historical context: he lived and worked a few yards from one of the great maritime rivers of the world, and for much of his career England was engaged in a naval war with Spain. So the Shakespearean sea invites two distinct perspectives poetics and history, the conventional literary symbol and the contingent economic struggle. This book embraces both of them together, tracing the intricate connections between them, and showing how they meet, above all, on the stage. It was in the Elizabethan playhouse that commercial enterprise, physical confinement and boundless rhetoric interacted to generate an imaginative energy whose waves can still be fel.

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9781399539494

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Peter Womack's brilliant study changes, in wonderfully invigorating ways, the topic of Shakespeare and the sea and how the sea is invoked in performance. Inevitably I reach for maritime metaphors, for he remaps our sense of the vastness and depths of the oceans to construct new charts. He is always an assured guide as we follow eagerly in his wake, engaged by his exciting discoveries.--Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame:

Peter Womack's brilliant study changes, in wonderfully invigorating ways, the topic of Shakespeare and the sea and how the sea is invoked in performance. Inevitably I reach for maritime metaphors, for he remaps our sense of the vastness and depths of the oceans to construct new charts. He is always an assured guide as we follow eagerly in his wake, engaged by his exciting discoveries.--Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame Shakespeare, the Sea and the Stage justifies its publication in the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture series by being full of aperçus about both the plays and the society which produced them. Lyrical and suggestive, it is full and rich like the sea itself.--Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University ""Shakespeare""

Author Information

Peter Womack is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia, where he taught courses on and around Shakespeare for thirty years. His books include Dialogue (2011), English Renaissance Drama (2006) and Ben Jonson (1986).

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