Overview
- The first ever collection of essays to associate Shakespeare studies with the death arts
- Differs significantly from previous scholarship that focuses on death merely as a theme of loss and privation
- Models an innovative paradigm for opening up fresh inquiries into interpreting and staging Shakespeare
Part of the book series: Palgrave Shakespeare Studies (PASHST)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (15 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Staging the Death Arts
-
Front Matter
-
-
Hamlet and the Death Arts
-
Front Matter
-
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This is the first book to view Shakespeare’s plays from the prospect of the premodern death arts, not only the ars moriendi tradition but also the plurality of cultural expressions of memento mori, funeral rituals, commemorative activities, and rhetorical techniques and strategies fundamental to the performance of the work of dying, death, and the dead. The volume is divided into two sections: first, critically nuanced examinations of Shakespeare’s corpus and then, second, of Hamlet exclusively as the ultimate proving ground of the death arts in practice. This book revitalizes discussion around key and enduring themes of mortality by reframing Shakespeare’s plays within a newly conceptualized historical category that posits a cultural divide—at once epistemological and phenomenological—between premodernity and the Enlightenment.
Reviews
“Shakespeare represents the art of death and his work has lived and lived long after his last breath. The rest and unrest, words and silence this collection so aptly addresses.” (Jonathan Locke Hart, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 46 (1), 2023)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
William E. Engel is the Nick B. Williams Professor of Literature at The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, USA. He has published eight books on literary history and applied emblematics, including two critical anthologies coauthored with Rory Loughnane and Grant Williams, The Death Arts in Renaissance England (2022) and The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016); and has coedited several collections of essays including Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England (2022) and Memory and Forgetting in the Early Modern Era (2018).
Grant Williams is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. With William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane, he has co-authored The Death Arts in Renaissance England (2022) and, with Donald Beecher, edited Henry Chettle’s Kind-Heart’s Dream and Piers Plainness: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade (2021). He has also co-authored The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016) with Engel and Loughnane and co-edited three collections: Taking Exception to the Law (2015), Ars reminiscendi (2009), and Lethe’s Legacies (2004)
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Shakespearean Death Arts
Book Subtitle: Hamlet Among the Tombs
Editors: William E. Engel, Grant Williams
Series Title: Palgrave Shakespeare Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88490-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-88489-5Published: 06 May 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-88492-5Published: 06 May 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-88490-1Published: 05 May 2022
Series ISSN: 2731-3204
Series E-ISSN: 2731-3212
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 346
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, Drama, Theatre History, Performing Arts, Cultural History