Goy-Blanquet, Dominique. From the Domesday Book to Shakespeare’s Globe: The Legal and Political Heritage of Elizabethan Drama

In an age when specialized monographs on early modern English drama often focus on a single topic, to write a book that conceptualizes the history of drama around two major topics-law and politics-represents a rare scholarly and intellectual endeavour.This book not only explores these two framing concepts but also delves into various issues, including legal, political, cultural, and literary exchanges between England and France.It examines the history of theatre in early modern England, highlighting the connection between theatre and law in both countries.Dominique Goy-Blanquet, who has also written insightfully about the rhetorical nature of Shakespeare's early history plays, now investigates the interaction between oratory and law courts to uncover drama's indebtedness to the legal profession.She discovers numerous connections between the dramaturgy of plays and judicial principles and practices through illuminating details that might easily escape even the most discerning critics.While Shakespeare is not "the central object of the present book, " he remains "central to its argument" (14) through this dense and consistently engaging history.The book searches for "the subtleties of legal speech" (21) in both plays and non-theatrical texts, interpreting the historical transformation of royal sovereignty and political subjectivity into a similarly nuanced theatrical discourse.Goy-Blanquet sets out to find evidence in plays spanning a long period of political and cultural history, from the 1086 survey of England in the Doomsday Book to some of Shakespeare's last plays in the seventeenth century.The facts of judicial-political movement is sought not just in language but also in the dramatic narratives and stage representations of events, spaces, dramatic figures, and dramatic situations.Reading this absorbing and thoroughly original book feels like encountering a fresh narrative of drama and history written by a brilliant narrator of historical events-one with a great skill for crafting an endlessly engaging story of that history.The book brims with detail and is written in elegant, transparent, and captivating prose.The long and complicated historical distinction between British common law and the

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.