Shakespeare's Liminal Spaces: Contesting Authority on the Early Modern Stage - Hardcover

by Ben Haworth (Author)

This engaging study appreciably advances recent critical developments in the way the playwright created his worlds to reflect concurrent cartographic, geopolitical and social anxieties. In seeking to expose the dynamics and fluctuations of power on the stage, Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare's forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures. Haworth's nuanced consideration of these spaces reveals that they were ideally suited to the staging of social frictions as he traces the shifting balance of power between opposing ideological standpoints and the internal struggles between an emergent subjectivity and conformity with the centralised authorities of Church and Court.

Back Jacket

Shakespeare's liminal spaces offers the first in-depth examination into the metaphorical and symbolic significations of Shakespeare's transitional spaces.

This provocative work appreciably advances recent critical developments in the way the playwright created his worlds to reflect concurrent cartographic, geopolitical and social anxieties. In seeking to expose the dynamics and fluctuations of power on the stage, this valuable book demonstrates how liminal settings such as forests, battlefields, shores and gardens were often employed to subvert centralised structures of power. Haworth's nuanced consideration of these spaces reveals that they were ideally suited to the staging of social frictions as he traces the shifting balance of power between opposing ideological standpoints and the internal struggles between an emergent subjectivity and conformity with the centralised authorities of Church and Court. He also presents a decisive resolution to long-standing critical disputes over the movement of power and the potential for subversion in both mental and physical representations of place, space and location.

Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare's liminal settings and geographic referents are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures.

Author Biography

Ben Haworth is a Lecturer of Early Modern Literature at Nottingham Trent University