Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England

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Cornell University Press, 2006 - 234 páginas

Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about treason within literary and polemical texts produced increasingly fractured conceptions of the crime of treason itself. Further, literary texts, in representing issues familiar from political polemic, helped to foster more free, less ideologically rigid, responses to the crisis of treason. As a result, such works of imagination bolstered an emerging discourse on subjects' rights. Treason by Words offers an original theory of the role of dissent and rebellion during a period of burgeoning sovereign power.

 

Contenido

CHAPTER
1
The Treason of Haywards Henry IV
23
Shakespeares Anatomy of Resistance in Richard II
52
CHAPTER FOUR
79
Donnes PseudoMartyr and PostGunpowder Plot Law
107
CHAPTER
137
Works Cited
203
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Acerca del autor (2006)

Rebecca Lemon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

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