{"product_id":"majesty-and-the-masses-in-shakespeare-and-marlowe","title":"Majesty and the Masses in Shakespeare and Marlowe","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis book is a landmark study of Shakespeare’s politics as revealed in his later History Plays. It offers the first ever survey of anti-monarchism in Western literature, history and philosophy, tracked from Hesiod and Homer through to contemporaries of Shakespeare such as George Buchanan and the authors of the \u003ci\u003eMirror for Magistrates\u003c\/i\u003e, thus demonstrating that anxiety over monarchic power, and contemptuous demolitions of kingship as a disastrously irrational institution, formed an important and irremovable body of reflection in prestigious Western writing. Overturning the widespread assumption that \"Elizabethans believed in divine right monarchy\", it exposits the anti-monarchic critique built into Shakespeare’s Histories and Marlowe’s \u003ci\u003eMassacre at Paris\u003c\/i\u003e, in five chapters of close literary critical readings, paying innovative attention to performance values.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePart Two focuses Queen Elizabeth’s principal challenger for national rule: the Earl of Essex, England’s most popular man. It demonstrates from detailed readings that, far from being an admirer of the war-crazed, unstable, bi-polar Essex, as is regularly asserted, Shakespeare launched in \u003ci\u003eRichard II\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eHenry IV\u003c\/i\u003e a campaign to puncture the reputation of the great earl, exposing him as a Machiavel seeking Elizabeth’s throne. Shakespeare emerges as a humane and clear-sighted critic of the follies intrinsic to dynastic monarchy: yet hostile, likewise, to the rash militarist, Essex, who would fling England into permanent war against Spain. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFounded on an unprecedented and wide-ranging study of anti-monarchist thought, this book presents a significant contribution to Shakespeare and Marlowe criticism, studies of Tudor England, and the history of ideas. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Taylor \u0026 Francis","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45542369231086,"sku":"9780367552503","price":67.19,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/bookland.com.au\/products\/majesty-and-the-masses-in-shakespeare-and-marlowe","provider":"Book Land AU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}