Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance

Shakespeare's Catholic context was the most important literary discovery of the twentieth-century. No biography of the Bard is now complete without chapters on the paranoia and persecution in which he was educated, or the treason which engulfed his family. Whether to suffer outrageous fortune or take up arms in suicidal resistance was, as Hamlet says, 'the question' that fired Shakespeare's stage. In Secret Shakespeare Richard Wilson asks why the dramatist remained so enigmatic about his own beliefs, and so silent on the atrocities he survived. Shakespeare constructed a drama not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a 'golden time' of future toleration, 'What's to come' is always unsure. Whether or not 'He died a papist', it is because we can never 'pluck out the heart' of his mystery that Shakespeare's plays retain their unique potential to resist.

Author: Richard Wilson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 06/03/2004
Pages: 326
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780719070259

About the Author

Richard Wilson is Professor of Renaissance Literature in the Department of English at the University of Lancaster

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