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The Times They Are A-changin’: Temporal Shifts in Early Modern...
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The Times They Are A-changin’: Temporal Shifts in Early Modern Drama

A special issue of Literature (ISSN 2410-9789).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 8646

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Lisa Hopkins

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Social work, Social care and Community Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield S1 1WB, UK
Interests: shakespeare; marlowe; john ford; jane austen; literature on screen; detective fiction; the gothic; the literary culture of the cavendish family
Dr. Megan Holman

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle NE7 7YT, UK
Interests: Shakespeare; adaptation; popular culture; bodies; puppetry; animation; graphic novels

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Sir John Falstaff enters the Shakespearean stage asking what time of day it is and leaves it at the turning of the tide. This collection of essays engages with ideas about temporal shifts in early modern drama. Topics of interest for this issue include (but are not limited to) changing seasons; the representation of individual seasons in plays; holidays and ritual markers of time; the ebb and flow of tides; measurement of time and perceptions of temporal change; day, night, dawn, and dusk; understandings of different time zones; the ageing process; saints’ days, quarter days, anniversaries, and other calendrical markers; accession days; and whether there was any awareness at the time of the period we now call the Little Ice Age. We welcome essays examining the abovementioned topics and other facets of temporal shift across text, performance, and other modes of adaptation. Essays may also discuss the performance of early modern plays as part of celebratory events or seasonal festivals. Alternatively, contributors may choose to focus on how temporal shifts have affected the transmission, reception, or study of early modern drama. Papers taking this approach might explore, for instance, how a particular period or movement has responded to plays or writers in ways which are shaped by their specific historical circumstances. 

Prof. Dr. Lisa Hopkins
Dr. Megan Holman
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Literature is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • time
  • seasons
  • calendrical markers
  • age

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 268 KiB  
Article
Aristotelian Time, Ethics, and the Art of Persuasion in Shakespeare’s Henry V
by Christopher Crosbie
Literature 2023, 3(1), 82-93; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature3010007 - 31 Jan 2023
Viewed by 1869
Abstract
In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine [...] Read more.
In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Henry’s invocation of an imagined future that understands the present as a theoretical past betrays a surprising indebtedness to Aristotle’s notion of time as “a measure of change with respect to the before and after.” Drawing on Aristotle’s theory that time depends upon a perceiving mind and that those unconscious of change mistakenly “join up the latter ‘now’ to the former and make it one,” this essay argues that Henry succeeds in altering his auditors’ behavior, and thus generating the history he desires, by merging their shared, lived present with his own fictive temporalities. A mode of persuasion famous in its ethical ambivalence, Henry’s rhetoric reveals how the very ontological assumptions governing perceptions of time may be manipulated, for good or ill, amid audiences who fail to critically envisage their own counterbalancing, imaginative histories. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Times They Are A-changin’: Temporal Shifts in Early Modern Drama)
15 pages, 316 KiB  
Article
‘In Her I See/All Beauties Frailty’: Mirroring Helen of Troy and Elizabeth I in Thomas Heywood’s The Iron Age and The Second Part of The Iron Age (c.1596/c.1610)
by Chloe Renwick
Literature 2022, 2(4), 383-397; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040032 - 12 Dec 2022
Viewed by 1332
Abstract
In this article I argue that Helen of Troy in Thomas Heywood’s The Iron Age I & II can be read as a figure for Elizabeth I during her final decade. Heywood appropriates multiple sources to emphasise images of age, decay and death [...] Read more.
In this article I argue that Helen of Troy in Thomas Heywood’s The Iron Age I & II can be read as a figure for Elizabeth I during her final decade. Heywood appropriates multiple sources to emphasise images of age, decay and death which connect Helen and Elizabeth by evoking concerns that were prevalent as the Queen aged. Whether we date the plays as late Elizabethan or early Jacobean, Heywood was writing at a time when people were thinking (in anticipation or retrospection) about Elizabeth’s death and the end of the Tudor line. In The Iron Age II, Heywood shows Helen lament the loss of her fabled beauty when she gazes into a mirror and sees an aged face that resembles Elizabeth’s. With her despair compounded by her guilt over the Trojan War, Helen turns to suicide and Heywood ends the entire Age pentalogy with a glance to the succession. Ultimately, in his treatment of Helen, Heywood subversively brings to centre stage images that Elizabeth (and her government) had tried to quash and opens up new forums for political commentary at London’s popular theatres. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Times They Are A-changin’: Temporal Shifts in Early Modern Drama)
13 pages, 520 KiB  
Article
Temporal Instability, Wildernesses, and the Otherworld in Early Modern Drama
by Edward B. M. Rendall
Literature 2022, 2(4), 329-341; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040027 - 29 Nov 2022
Viewed by 1412
Abstract
This article shows how temporal disorder diffuses into the wildernesses within early modern English drama. Those areas beyond the walls of cities and castles in—among other plays—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth thus flit free from [...] Read more.
This article shows how temporal disorder diffuses into the wildernesses within early modern English drama. Those areas beyond the walls of cities and castles in—among other plays—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth thus flit free from the temporal rules that construct a play’s quotidian world, and the conspicuous partitions that enclose an otherworld in medieval iconography no longer seem clear within them. I argue that these spaces enact an unfamiliar and chaotic ‘otherworld’ within quotidian space, and characters’ ventures into these outer regions at certain points resemble movements into an ‘afterlife’. Journeys into a wilderness, then, parallel a shift from one temporal sphere to another, and characters encounter a post-death state of being within the play’s present. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Times They Are A-changin’: Temporal Shifts in Early Modern Drama)
14 pages, 262 KiB  
Article
Temporal Compression in Shakespeare’s Richard III
by Paul Innes and Katie James
Literature 2022, 2(4), 315-328; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2040026 - 23 Nov 2022
Viewed by 1233
Abstract
Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III has long been the cause of debates about Tudor defamations of the last Yorkist king. Within this context, some attention has been paid to the play’s extreme compression of events that in fact took place over a period [...] Read more.
Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III has long been the cause of debates about Tudor defamations of the last Yorkist king. Within this context, some attention has been paid to the play’s extreme compression of events that in fact took place over a period of seven years, from the death of George, Duke of Clarence in 1478 to the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. This study investigates the momentum of events to gauge the extent to which the representation of Richard does paint him in an entirely negative light. Detailed analysis of the timeline demonstrates that the way the play re-structures historical moments is designed to foreground not only the figure of Richard himself, with all its attendant associations, but also the very methods used to concentrate attention upon him. The self-referential nature of the play’s relationship to history points to its own constructions, foregrounding the techniques used to show not only the legend of Richard, but how it is elaborated. The play therefore draws attention to its own manipulation of events, which in turn makes any assumptions about its representation of Richard as villain open to question. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Times They Are A-changin’: Temporal Shifts in Early Modern Drama)
11 pages, 266 KiB  
Article
Staging St George after the Reformation
by Lisa Hopkins
Literature 2022, 2(3), 189-199; https://doi.org/10.3390/literature2030016 - 06 Sep 2022
Viewed by 1353
Abstract
This essay considers various ways in which St George, an important figure in mummers’ plays before the Protestant Reformation, remained a presence in drama and popular entertainment long after one would have expected him to have disappeared. It notes his importance in the [...] Read more.
This essay considers various ways in which St George, an important figure in mummers’ plays before the Protestant Reformation, remained a presence in drama and popular entertainment long after one would have expected him to have disappeared. It notes his importance in the agricultural calendar, his strong association with fireworks, his popular designation as a specifically English saint, and some of the customs traditionally observed on his feast day of 23 April. It then moves on to consider some of the plays in which he is mentioned or alluded to, including works by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher, as well as a romance by Richard Johnson that was later dramatized, and culminates with references in three plays produced by members of the Cavendish family of Bolsover and Welbeck. It argues that referring to St George offered a way of talking about Englishness even when (perhaps especially when) that concept was contested, and also suggests that the legendary folk hero Guy of Warwick, presented in some texts as the son of St George, could sometimes act as a dramatic proxy for the saint. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Times They Are A-changin’: Temporal Shifts in Early Modern Drama)
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