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The Uses of this World

Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson

Author(s) Andrew Hiscock

Hardback - £60

Language: English

Genre(s): Literary Criticism

October 2004 · 240 pages ·216x138mm

· Hardback - 9780708318881

About The Book

The Uses of this World examines how early modern theatre texts dramatize the ways in which cultural space is produced. It demonstrates that the theatre engaged fully with the fundamental change in the social and philosophical organization of space which took place in this period. Andrew Hiscock argues that Renaissance drama interrogates models of social organization and spatial boundaries defined by property relations, economic hierarchies, historical custom and kinship ties, and stresses that space is not a neutral, fixed and passive container, but emerges instead as a socially constructed process. Plays considered include Hamlet, The Jew of Malta, Antony and Cleopatra, Tragedie of Mariam (Elizabeth Cary), Volpone and The Alchemist.

Introduction (I) Thinking Space for Hamlet; Introduction (II) 'What's Hecuba to him...': Imitative Space and myths of Belonging in Hamlet; Chapter One Enclosing 'infinite riches in a little room'. The question of cultural marginality in The Jew of Malta; Chapter Two 'Here is my Space'. The Politics of Appropriation in Antony and Cleopatra; Chapter Three Erotic Sovereignty: Crises of Desire and Faith in The Winter's Tale and Henry VIII; Chapter Four The Hateful Cuckoo. Elizabeth Cary's Tragedie of Mariam, a Renaissance drama of Dispossession; Chapter Five Urban Dystopia: the Colonising of Venice in Volpone; Chapter Six 'With your ungoverned haste'. The passing of Time and Empires in The Alchemist

About the Author(s)

Author(s): Andrew Hiscock

Andrew Hiscock is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales, and a Fellow of the English Association. He is English editor for the academic journal MLR, series editor for The Yearbook of English Studies and series co-editor for the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. He has published widely on early modern writing and his other monographs include Authority and Desire: Crises of Interpretation in Shakespeare and Racine and Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature. He co-edited Dangerous Diversity: The Changing Faces of Wales from the Renaissance to the Present Day with Katie Gramich which was published with University of Wales Press in 1998.