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

David Wiles

D.S. Brewer, 1993

Available at  / 15 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

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"

Details

Page Top