Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama - Hardcover

Poole, Kristen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107008352 ISBN 13: 9781107008359

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.

About this title

Book Description:

Kristen Poole considers the complex, paradoxical engagements of the demonic, the divine and the spatial environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest. The study explores how the convergence of Reformation beliefs and Renaissance notions of space affected English understandings about the supernatural.

About the Author:

Kristen Poole is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Delaware. She specializes in the religious culture and literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. She is the author of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and has published articles in numerous scholarly journals.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1107008352
• ISBN 13: 9781107008359
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 306