Bøker av Lisa Hopkins

In 1906 the German scholar Willy Bang published an edition of The Queen, or the excellency of her sex in which he claimed it as a previously unrecognised play by the Caroline dramatist John Ford. The attribution stuck, but the play has rarely been edited, performed, or analysed. This first Revels edition resituates The Queen in the Ford canon and explores how it spoke to audiences both when it was first composed in the late 1620s and when it was finally published in 1653, revealing it as a play about love, jealousy, melancholy, sovereignty, strangeness, and female rule. In the 1620s the heroine, who is queen of Aragon in her own right, might have seemed to echo both Katherine of Aragon and Elizabeth I; by 1653 its three separate scenes showing threatened (though aborted) executions and its discussion of monarchic power spoke of the recently executed Charles I and of his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots before him. Its pathologically misogynist hero is a more timeless figure whose reliance on flatterers and astrologers reveals deep-seated insecurities, while the subplot explores the uneasy relationship between love and sex. Presented here in modern spelling and with a detailed commentary and introduction, The Queen is revealed as a delicate blend of light and shade, comedy and tragedy, and verse and prose, which treats its main characters as both private and public figures.

From Sherlock Holmes onwards, fictional detectives use lenses: Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction argues that these visual aids are metaphors for ways of seeing, and that they help us to understand not only individual detectives¿ methods but also the kinds of cultural work detective fiction may do. It is sometimes regarded as a socially conservative form, and certainly the enduring popularity of ¿Golden Age¿ writers such as Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh implies a strong element of nostalgia in the appeal of the genre. The emphasis on visual aids, however, suggests that solving crime is not a simple matter of uncovering truth but a complex, sophisticated and inherently subjective process, and thus challenges any sense of comforting certainties. Moreover, the value of eye-witness testimony is often troubled in detective fiction by use of the phrase ¿the ocular proof¿, whose origin in Shakespeare¿s Othello reminds usthat Othello is manipulated by Iago into misinterpreting what he sees. The act of seeing thus comes to seem ideological and provisional, and Lisa Hopkins argues that the kind of visual aid selected by each detective is an index of his particular propensities and biases.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.

This book examines the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century engagement with a crucial part of Britain's past, the period between the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the Norman Conquest. A number of early modern plays suggest an underlying continuity, an essential English identity linked to the land and impervious to change. This book considers the extent to which ideas about early modern English and British national, religious, and political identities were rooted in cultural constructions of the pre-Conquest past.

Exploring how the Gothic has been deployed in contemporary films.

It ranges widely over a variety of authors including classic golden age crime writers such as the four 'queens of crime' (Allingham, Christie, Marsh, Sayers), Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin, as well as more recent authors such as Reginald Hill, Kate Atkinson and Val McDermid.

Explores the way in which the stories of the Caesars, and of the Julio-Claudians in particular, can be used to figure the stories of English rulers on the Renaissance stage. This title demonstrates how early modern English dramatists, using Roman modes of literary representation as cover, commented on the issues of the day.

The succession to the throne was a burning topic not only in the final years of Elizabeth but well into the 1630s. This title analyzes some of the ways in which the dramatic works of the time - by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster and Ford among others - reflect, negotiate and dream the issue of the succession to the throne.

Considering a variety of questions centering on magic and, or in, performance, this volume furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. Collectively the essays show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects and subjects of magic.

The first scholarly edition of a little-known play by a major Renaissance playwright, which interestingly reworks Othello. -- .

Lisa Hopkins analyzes eight film adaptations which have taken either Shakespeare or Jane Austen - icons of Englishness - out of their original geographical or cultural context and transposed them to a new location, allowing for a powerful interrogation both of what these texts mean in the modern world, and of Englishness itself.

This book offers a lively introduction to all of the plays of Christopher Marlowe and to the central concerns of his age, many of which are still important to us--religious uncertainty, the clash between Islam and Christianity, ideas of sexuality, and the role of the marginalised inidividual in society.Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of Marlowe's work and its cultural contexts: Marlowe's life and death; the Marlowe canon; the theatrical contexts and stage history of the plays; Marlowe's interest in old and new branches of knowledge; the ways in which he transgresses against established norms and values; and the major issues which have been raised in critical discussions of his plays.

Introduces students to the study of Shakespeare and grounds their understandings of his work in theoretical discourses. By addressing what is primarily at stake in the major theoretical approaches to Shakespeare's works, the book breaks down both fears and preconceptions to offer students a map of the current critical practices of others. -- .