Gaming the Stage also introduces a new archive for game studies: scenes of onstage gaming, which appear at climactic moments in dramatic literature. Bloom reveals plays to be systems of information for theater spectators: games of withholding, divulging, speculating, and wagering on knowledge. Her book breaks new ground through examinations of plays such as The Tempest, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and A Game at Chess; the histories of familiar games such as cards, backgammon, and chess; less familiar ones, like Game of the Goose; and even a mixed-reality theater videogame.
Reputed to have performed miraculous feats in New England—restoring the hair and teeth to an aged lady, bringing a withered peach tree to fruit—Eirenaeus Philalethes was also rumored to be an adept possessor of the alchemical philosophers’ stone. That the man was merely a mythical creation didn’t diminish his reputation a whit—his writings were spectacularly successful, read by Leibniz, esteemed by Newton and Boyle, voraciously consumed by countless readers. Gehennical Fire is the story of the man behind the myth, George Starkey.
Though virtually unknown today and little noted in history, Starkey was America’s most widely read and celebrated scientist before Benjamin Franklin. Born in Bermuda, he received his A.B. from Harvard in 1646 and four years later emigrated to London, where he quickly gained prominence as a “chymist.” Thanks in large part to the scholarly detective work of William Newman, we now know that this is only a small part of an extraordinary story, that in fact George Starkey led two lives. Not content simply to publish his alchemical works under the name Eirenaeus Philalethes, “A Peaceful Lover of Truth,” Starkey spread elaborate tales about his alter ego, in effect giving him a life of his own.
Looking at a heretofore overlooked set of archival records of London in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Hurl-Eamon reassesses the impact of gender on petty crime and its prosecution during the period. This book offers a new approach to the growing body of work on the history of violence in past societies. By focusing upon low-cost prosecutions in minor courts, Hurl-Eamon uncovers thousands of assaults on the streets of early modern London. Previous histories stressing the masculine nature of past violence are questioned here: women perpetrated one-third of all assaults. In looking at more mundane altercations rather than the homicidal attacks studied in previous histories, the book investigates violence as a physical language, with some forms that were subject to gender constraints, but many of which were available to both men and women. Quantitative analyses of various circumstances surrounding the assaults—including initial causes, weapons used, and injuries sustained—outline the patterns of violence as a language.
Hurl-Eamon also stresses the importance of focusing on the prosecutorial voice. In bringing the court’s attention to petty attacks, thousands of early modern men and women should be seen as agents rather than victims. This view is especially interesting in the context of domestic violence, where hundreds of wives and servants prosecuted patriarchs for assault, and in the Mohock Scare of 1712, where London’s populace rose up in opposition to aristocratic violence. The discussion is informed by a detailed knowledge of assault laws and the rules governing justices of the peace.
Taking on nothing less than the formation of modern genders and sexualities, Thomas A. King develops a history of the political and performative struggles that produced both normative and queer masculinities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is a major contribution to gender studies, gay studies, and theater and performance history.
The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750 traces the transition from a society based on alliance, which had subordinated all men, women, and boys to higher ranked males, to one founded in sexuality, through which men have embodied their claims to personal and political privacy. King proposes that the male body is a performative production marking men’s resistance to their subjection within patriarchy and sovereignty. Emphasizing that categories of gender must come under historical analysis, The Gendering of Men explores men’s particpation in an ongoing struggle for access to a universal manliness transcending other biological and social differentials.
This is volume one of two projected volumes.
"Patten consistently manages with great deftness to intertwine the personal and the historical, the strands of Cruikshank's life and those of his caricatures, illustrations, and moralities without a sign of jargon or pedantry. . . . This is a monumental life and works."--Ronald Paulson, The Johns Hopkins University
"At last, an authoritative, exhaustively researched biography of one of nineteenth-century England's greatest popular artists! It will rescue him from the biographical obscurity in which he has dwelt and inspire a fresh estimate of his achievement as a rough-and-tumble caricaturist and prolific book illustrator."--Richard D. Altick, Ohio State University
The etchings and wood engravings by George Cruikshank (1792-1878) recorded, commented on, and satirized his times to such an extent that they have been frequently used to represent the age. Cruikshank, a popular artist in the propaganda war against Napoleon, an ardent campaigner for Reform and Temperance, and the foremost illustrator of such classics as Grimms' Fairy Tales, Scott's novels, and Dickens's Oliver Twist, is known for his versatility, imagination, humor, and incisive images. His long life, marked by a ceaseless struggle to win recognition for his art, intersected with many of Britain's important political, social, and cultural leaders.
Robert Patten provides the first documentary biography of Cruikshank. In this first volume of a two-volume work, which covers the artist's Regency caricatures and early book illustrations, Patten demonstrates the ways that Cruikshank was, as his contemporaries frequently declared, the Hogarth of the nineteenth century. Having reviewed over 8,500 unpublished letters and most of Cruikshank's 12,000 or more printed images, Patten gives a thorough and reliable account of the artist's career. He puts Cruikshank's achievement into a variety of larger contexts--publishing history, political and cultural history, the traditions of figurations practiced by Cruikshank's contemporaries, and the literary and social productions of nineteenth-century Britain.
Published to coincide with the Fall 1992 bicentennial celebrations of the artist's birth, this biography provides both the general reader and the specialist with a wealth of new information conveyed in a lively, non-technical prose. Patten's book contributes to current investigation of the rich interactions between high art and low art, texts and pictures, politics and imagination.
Puritans did not find a life free from tyranny in the New World—they created it there. Massachusetts emerged a republic as they hammered out a vision of popular participation and limited government in church and state, spurred by Plymouth Pilgrims. Godly Republicanism underscores how pathbreaking yet rooted in puritanism’s history the project was.
Michael Winship takes us first to England, where he uncovers the roots of the puritans’ republican ideals in the aspirations and struggles of Elizabethan Presbyterians. Faced with the twin tyrannies of Catholicism and the crown, Presbyterians turned to the ancient New Testament churches for guidance. What they discovered there—whether it existed or not—was a republican structure that suggested better models for governing than monarchy.
The puritans took their ideals to Massachusetts, but they did not forge their godly republic alone. In this book, for the first time, the separatists’ contentious, creative interaction with the puritans is given its due. Winship looks at the emergence of separatism and puritanism from shared origins in Elizabethan England, considers their split, and narrates the story of their reunion in Massachusetts. Out of the encounter between the separatist Plymouth Pilgrims and the puritans of Massachusetts Bay arose Massachusetts Congregationalism.
Tattoos and graffiti immediately bring to mind contemporary urban life and its inhabitants. But in fact, both practices date back much further than is generally thought—even by scholars. Drawing on a previously unavailable archive, Juliet Fleming reveals the unknown and disregarded literary arts of sixteenth century England.
In Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, Fleming argues that our modern assumptions of what constitutes written expression have limited our access to and understanding of early modern history and writing. Fleming combines detailed historical scholarship with intellectual daring in a work that describes how writing practices have not been limited to the boundaries of the page; instead they have included body surfaces, ceramics, ceilings, walls, and windows.
Moving beyond what has been preserved in print and manuscript, this book claims the whitewashed wall as the primary textual canvas of the early modern English, explores the tattooing practices of sixteenth-century Europeans, and uncovers the poetics of ceramic cookware. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England will provide a startling new perspective for scholars of early modern literature and cultural history.
Rosamund Marriott Watson was a gifted poet, an erudite literary and art critic, and a daring beauty whose life illuminates fin-de-siècle London and the way in which literary reputations are made—and lost. A participant in aestheticism and decadence, she wrote six volumes of poems noted for their subtle cadence, diction, and uncanny effects. Linda K. Hughes unfolds a complex life in Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, tracing the poet’s development from accomplished ballads and sonnets, to avant-garde urban impressionism and New Woman poetry, to her anticipation of literary modernism.
Despite an early first divorce, she won fame writing under a pseudonym, Graham R. Tomson. The influential Andrew Lang announced the arrival of a new poet he assumed to be a man. She was soon hosting a salon attended by Lang, Oscar Wilde, and other 1890s notables. Publishing to widespread praise as Graham R., she exemplified the complex cultural politics of her era. A woman with a man’s name and a scandalous past, she was also a graceful beauty who captivated Thomas Hardy and left an impression on his work. At the height of her success she fell in love with writer H. B. Marriott Watson and dared a second divorce.
Graham R. combines the stories of a gifted poet, of London literary networks in the 1890s, and of a bold woman whose achievements and scandals turned on her unusual history of marriage and divorce. Her literary history and her uncommon experience reveal the limits and opportunities faced by an unconventional, ambitious, and talented woman at the turn of the century.
Behind the passionate debate over gun control and armed crime lurk assumptions about the link between guns and violence. Indeed, the belief that more guns in private hands means higher rates of armed crime underlies most modern gun control legislation. But are these assumptions valid?
Investigating the complex and controversial issue of the real relationship between guns and violence, Joyce Lee Malcolm presents an incisive, thoroughly researched historical study of England, whose strict gun laws and low rates of violent crime are often cited as proof that gun control works. To place the private ownership of guns in context, Malcolm offers a wide-ranging examination of English society from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century, analyzing changing attitudes toward crime and punishment, the impact of war, economic shifts, and contrasting legal codes on violence. She looks at the level of armed crime in England before its modern restrictive gun legislation, the limitations that gun laws have imposed, and whether those measures have succeeded in reducing the rate of armed crime.
Malcolm also offers a revealing comparison of the experience in England experience with that in the modern United States. Today Americans own some 200 million guns and have seen eight consecutive years of declining violence, while the English--prohibited from carrying weapons and limited in their right to self-defense have suffered a dramatic increase in rates of violent crime.
This timely and thought-provoking book takes a crucial step in illuminating the actual relationship between guns and violence in modern society.
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