Addressing an imbalance in early modern studies, Bonnie Lander Johnson reveals how, through interest in popular plant cultures and beliefs tree ballads, embroidery, pedagogical tales, almanacs Shakespeare put illiterate culture in contact with questions usually deemed learned and elite: theology, politics, the military and medicine.
The Shakespearean stage offered London playgoers a glimpse of the illiterate and rural plant cultures rapidly disappearing from their increasingly urban and sophisticated lives. The same cultures also circulated in popular texts offstage: bawdy tree ballads, botanical tales, almanacs and accounts of kitchen physic. Here Bonnie Lander Johnson argues that, while Shakespeare's plants offered audiences a nostalgic vision of childhood, domestic education and rural pastimes, this was in fact done with an ironic gesture that claimed for illiterate culture an intellectual relevance ignored by the learned and largely Protestant realm of print. Addressing a long-standing imbalance in early modern scholarship, she reveals how Shakespeare's plays and the popular, low botanical beliefs they represent engaged with questions usually deemed high, literate and elite: theological and liturgical controversies, the politics of state, England's role in Elizabethan naval conflict and the increasingly learned realm of medical authority.
Recenzijas
'Expertly grafting Shakespeare and critical plant studies, this book establishes that Shakespeare's botanical imagery savoured of the vanishing rural world outside London as well as the burgeoning trade networks of global modernity. Lander Johnson reveals the ubiquitous material presence of plants in early modern households in the form of textiles, dyes, medicines, and food to offer fresh perspectives on four Shakespearean plays, while distilling the rhetorical power of Shakespeare's plants in thorny debates about medical authority, God's immanence in the natural world, and monarchical sovereignty over the realm.' Todd Borlik, Professor of Shakespeare Studies & Renaissance Literature, University of Huddersfield 'Drawing on an abundance of rich material and insightful analysis, Lander Johnson breaks new ground in the growing body of research around the culture of botany, plants, and horticulture in early modern England. The book stands out for its focus on the profound religious and popular beliefs associated with the plants evoked in Shakespeare's plays, beliefs that are now lost in time.' Rebecca Bushnell, School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisors Emerita Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Papildus informācija
Examining the long-overlooked illiterate arts, this is a rich study of practices surrounding plants and their role in Shakespeare's plays.
Introduction: theatre, nostalgia and the reformation of plants; Part I. Plants: Monarchs, signatures and the recuperation of the 'common':
1. Trees, kings, Christ: almanacs, ballads and the divinity of matter in Richard II;
2. Pansies, queens, midwives: fairy flowers, travellers' tales and domestic practice in a midsummer night's dream; Part II. Places: Domestic and civic: negotiating botanical cultures in the theatre:
3. The theatre as medical marketplace: poison, desire and cultures of diagnosis: Romeo and Juliet;
4. The theatre as bower: botanical tapestries, the passion of Christ and the book of nature in Cymbeline; Conclusion: the mulberry tree; Index.
Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow and Associate Professor at Downing College, Cambridge University. Her academic books include Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Blood Matters (2018) and The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants (forthcoming). She also writes fiction and non-fiction about early modernity and our changing relationship to the natural world.
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