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19 results

Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557–1623
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by Kristen Poole, Lauren Shohet
  • Published online:
    12 January 2019
    Print publication:
    17 January 2019
  • During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England grew from a marginal to a major European power, established overseas settlements, and negotiated the Protestant Reformation. The population burgeoned and became increasingly urban. England also saw the meteoric rise of commercial theatre in London, the creation of a vigorous market for printed texts, and the emergence of writing as a viable profession. Literacy rates exploded, and an increasingly diverse audience encountered a profusion of new textual forms. Media, and literary culture, transformed on a scale that would not happen again until television and the Internet. The twenty innovative contributions in Gathering Force: Early Modern Literature in Transition, 1557–1623 trace ways that five different genres both spurred and responded to change. Chapters explore different facets of lyric poetry, romance, commercial drama, masques and pageants, and non-narrative prose. Exciting and accessible, this volume illuminates the dynamic relationships among the period's social, political, and literary transformations.

  • The Banquet of Scotland (PA)

  • Edited by Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book:
    Shakespeare Survey
    Published online:
    28 March 2007
    Print publication:
    25 November 2004, pp 186-195
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  • Summary

    he is full so valiant,

    And in his commendations I am fed;

    It is a banquet to me

    (Macbeth 1.4.56–8)

    Commending the victorious Macbeth with these lines, King Duncan sets up a model of mutual nourishment between lord and vassal, between political father and son. Duncan’s praise is commodiously ambiguous, potentially pointing both to other thanes’ reports of Macbeth’s valour as nourishment for Duncan and to Duncan’s advancement of Macbeth as itself a source of nourishment: by praising him, I am fed; his valour and my remarking that valour constitute the mise en place for concocting the comedic feast of successful community. ‘Banquet’ evokes both social and natural, both festive celebration and quotidian requirement. Being ‘fed’ – here in provocatively passive construction – also signals the way that food functions as a liminal substance that is both part and not part of the individual who ingests it, the way eating enacts both agency (the eater masticating, consuming, metabolizing the foodstuff) and dependence (without sustenance, no agent survives). All these resonances accrue to the dramatic logic of food as a leitmotif in Macbeth.

    Billy Morissette’s film Scotland, PA (premiered at the 2001 Sundance festival and commercially released by Lot 47 films in 2002) playfully literalizes Duncan’s ‘banquet’, exploring these questions of agency and identity in the context of depressed – if officially only ‘recessed’ – 1970s rural America. This black comedy, Morissette’s first feature film, offers a surprisingly detailed and nuanced set of ways to think about identity and agency in both Macbeth and the 1970s.