Power on display : the politics of Shakespeare's genres

First published in 1986. 'Impressively open to the complexity of cultural discourses, to the ways in which one discursive form may function as a screen for another above all to the political entailment of genre.' Stephen Greenblatt. What is the relation between literary and political power? How do the symbolic dimensions of social practice and the social dimensions of artistic practice relate to one another? Power on Display considers Shakespeare's progression from romantic comedies and history plays to tragedy and romance in the light of the general process of cultural change in the period. Introduction: Shakespeare And The Scene Of Reading -- Staging Carnival: Comedy And The Politics Of The Aristocratic Body -- Rituals Of State: History And The Elizabethan Strategies Of Power -- The Theatre Of Punishment: Jacobean Tragedy And The Politics Of Misogyny -- Family Rites: City Comedy, Romance, And The Strategies Of Patriarchalism Leonard Tennenhouse. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. [187]-200. This study of Shakespeare pursues the thesis that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre "staged displays which created political literacy...the stage was a place for disseminating an iconography of state." 206 p. ; 25 cm Includes bibliographical references and index