Shakespeare's almanac : A midsummer night's dream, marriage, and the Elizabethan calendar
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Shakespeare's almanac : A midsummer night's dream, marriage, and the Elizabethan calendar
D.S. Brewer, 1993
Available at 15 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
For a century scholars have debated whether A Midsummer Night's Dreamwas written as an occasional play or for the professional theatre: the answer is fundamental to an understanding of Shakespeare's position within the Elizabethan world. David Wiles, arguing for close links between Shakespeare and his aristocratic patrons, maintains that the play was commissioned for the wedding of the granddaughter of Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain. To support his argument, he examines the conventions of the wedding masque and demonstrates that astrological allusions are a major feature of the genre; he then shows that A Midsummer Night's Dreamcontains planetary references which fit the date of the wedding. The apparently arbitrary timescheme of the play thus assumes an underlying logic, adding a further dimension to a many-layered text. Such readings are also shown to shed light on the significance of other calendrical references in Shakespeare's plays.DAVID WILESis Reader in Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
Table of Contents
- The court play
- "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and "Love's Labours' Lost"
- the wedding masque
- epithalamia and the symbolism of midsummmer
- festive inversion of time and place
- three festivals
- "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as epithalamium
- weddings and popular astrology
- the Percy-Devereux and Stanley-Vere weddings
- the Carey-Berkeley wedding.
by "Nielsen BookData"