Death and Drama in Renaissance England Shades of Memory [Hardcover]

Drawing on a range of works from the English Renaissance,Death and Drama in Renaissance Englandoffers a novel way to understand, in their original contexts, key aspects of Renaissance mental life and letters. Focusing on the classical Memory Arts, William Engel explores issues of death and decline in exemplary dramas, dictionaries, and histories of the period, and demonstrates the ways in which emblems and memory images were used to communicate special meanings.

List of illustrations
Note on conventions used in the text
Preface
Introduction: 'Take Away But One Letter': The Spirit of Decline
I. Staging kinetic emblems of fatal destiny
1. 'Commonplaces of memory': visual regimes and charmed spaces
2. 'But yet each circumstance I taste not fully': spectacles of ruin
II. The true work of translation
3. 'Touching my translation': linguistic decorum and memory's domain
III. The marrow and moral of history
4. 'O eloquent, iust, and mighty Death!': endingThe History of the World
5. 'More easie to the readers memory': usingThe History of the World
Conclusion: 'Simulars of the dead': a final declension
Appendix: The end of Ralegh'sHistory of the World
Bibliography
Index

Engel offers intriguing examples...marks a fresh contribution to this scholarship. --Shakespeare Studies Annual

Engel provides a useful methodology for examining other contemporary works...provocative readings... --Libraries & Culture

An intriguingly labyrinthine and learned account of the function of emblems, including emblematic aspects of drama. --Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Engel is the first post-Yates scholar to offer a compelling account of the importance of the memory arts in the English Renaissance.... Engel attends with sensitivity and acumen to the complex ways that mnemonic art encodlóF