Robin Headlam Wells's Books

Shakespeare's Humanism

By: Robin Headlam Wells

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Renaissance humanists believed that if you want to build a just society you must begin with the facts of human nature. This book argues that the idea of a universal human nature was as important to Shakespeare as it was to every other Renaissance writer. In doing so it questions the central principle of post-modern Shakespeare criticism. Postmodernists insist that the notion of defining a human essence was alien to Shakespeare and his contemporaries; as radical anti-essentialists, the Elizabethans were, in effect, postmodernists before their time. In challenging this claim Shakespeare's Humanism shows that for Shakespeare, as for every other humanist writer in this period, the key to all wise action was 'the knowledge of our selves and our human condition'.

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Page Count

290

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1139447475

ISBN 13

9781139447478

Shakespeare on Masculinity

By: Robin Headlam Wells

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Shakespeare on Masculinity

By: Robin Headlam Wells

Reviews Shakespeare's view of masculinity through The Tempest, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and others.

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Page Count

263

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521662044

ISBN 13

9780521662048

Shakespeare’s Politics

A Contextual Introduction

By: Robin Headlam Wells

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Shakespeare’s Politics

A Contextual Introduction

By: Robin Headlam Wells

Shakespeare's Politics is an invaluable introduction to the political world of Shakespeare's plays. It includes passages from the plays together with extracts from contemporary historical and political documents. The clear, jargon-free narrative introduces and explains the extracts and provides an overview of the key political issues that were debated in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England. The introduction outlines the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote and explains the intellectual principles that informed early modern thinking about politics. By reading Shakespeare alongside contemporary documents students will be able to develop their own informed critical interpretations of the plays. Shakespeare's Politics is essential for anyone studying Shakespeare while tutors and postgraduate students will find the book's up-to-date survey of modern Shakespeare criticism useful and provocative.

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Page Count

248

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826463142

ISBN 13

9780826463142

Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth

By: Robin Headlam Wells

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Spenser's Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth

By: Robin Headlam Wells

First published in 1983, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth presents The Faerie Queene as a central document in the cult of Elizabeth. It shows how Spenser combines the resources of medieval iconography and Renaissance rhetoric in celebrating the Queen as the predestined ruler of an elect nation. In its introductory discussion of Renaissance poetics, the book emphasises the contemporary belief in the moral function of praise. Particular attention is given to the popular identification of Elizabeth with the Virgin Mary. If Elizabeth’s gender created problems for a poet writing in the heroic mode, at the same time it made available to him a form of praise that no secular poet had been able to use before. While the book contains material of interest to the Renaissance specialist, its lucid style and the valuable background material it provides will appeal to undergraduates reading Spenser for the first time.

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Page Count

198

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Published Date

ISBN 10

1003835848

ISBN 13

9781003835844

Elizabethan Mythologies

Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music

By: Robin Headlam Wells

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Elizabethan Mythologies

Studies in Poetry, Drama and Music

By: Robin Headlam Wells

For lovers of music and poetry the legendary figure of Orpheus probably suggests a romantic ideal. But for the Renaissance he is essentially a political figure. Mythographers interpreted the Orpheus story as an allegory of the birth of civilization because they recognized in the arts in which Orpheus excelled an instrument of social control so powerful that with it you could, as one writer put it, 'winne Cities and whole Countries'. Dealing with plays, poems, songs and the iconography of musical instruments, Robin Headlam Wells re-examines the myth, central to the Orpheus story, of the transforming power of music and poetry. Elizabethan Mythologies, first published in 1994, contains numerous illustrations from the period and will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance poetry, drama and music, and of the history of ideas.

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