About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherCambridge University Press

ISBN-101009362763

ISBN-139781009362764

eBay Product ID (ePID)24060619313

Product Key Features

Book TitleLibels and Theater in Shakespeare's England : Publics, Politics, Performance

Number of Pages300 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2023

TopicEuropean / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

IllustratorYes

GenreLiterary Criticism

AuthorJoseph Mansky

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Length9.3 in

Item Width6.2 in

Additional Product Features

LCCN2023-019833

Reviews'This important book recovers the forgotten history of a genre that was central to the social and political life of early modern England: the libel, Joseph Mansky shows, circulated through provinces, city streets, alehouses, and playhouses as a public-making document, binding together strangers even as it set them at odds with each other. Mansky's book is as essential to scholars of early modern literature as it is to anyone interested in the conflicts that shape our public spheres today.' Matthew Hunter, Texas Tech University, 'Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England convincingly argues that libel was the axis on which the early modern public sphere spun. Joseph Mansky offers an absorbing history of libel, probes the gaps between legal codes and actual practice, and nests compelling readings of famous, infamous, obscure, and lost plays within vividly recreated flashpoints of English politics from 1590 to 1620. Impressively researched and studded with new discoveries, Libels and Theater is an elegantly written, deeply engaging book that represents the best of our discipline's fusion of literary studies, history, and law.' Jeffrey Doty, University of North Texas

Dewey Edition23

Dewey Decimal822.309353

Table Of ContentIntroduction: Seeds of Sedition; Part I The Scene of Libel; 1. How to Read a Libel in Early Modern England; 2. Playing Libel from Cambridge to Kendal; Part II. Libels on the Elizabethan Stage; 3. Libels Supplicatory: Shakespeare and Peele's Titus Andronicus; 4. Libel, Equity, and Law in Sir Thomas More; 5. Jane Shore's Public: Pity and Politics in Heywood's Edward IV; 6. Turning Plays into Libels: Satire and Sedition in Jonson's Poetaster.

SynopsisIn the first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, Joseph Mansky traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, outlining a viral and often virulent media ecosystem. During the 1590s, a series of crises - simmering xenophobia, years of dearth and hunger, surges of religious persecution - sparked an extraordinary explosion of libeling. The same years also saw the first appearances of libels on London stages. Defamatory, seditious texts were launched into the sky, cast in windows, recited in court, read from pulpits, and seized by informers. Avatars of sedition, libels nonetheless empowered ordinary people to pass judgment on the most controversial issues and persons of the day. They were marked by mobility, swirling across the early modern media and across class, confessional, and geographical lines. Ranging from Shakespearean drama to provincial pageantry, this book charts a public sphere poised between debate and defamation, between free speech and fake news., The first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, this interdisciplinary study traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, focusing especially on the theater. Ranging from Shakespeare to provincial pageantry, it provides a fresh account of early modern drama and the viral media ecosystem springing up around it.

LC Classification NumberPR658.L38M36 2023