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Document Type
Monograph
Description
Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare’s drama and Spenser’s allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero’s art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and sonnets and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Complaints.
Publication Date
9-20-2019
Publisher
Medieval Institute Publications
Imprint
Medieval Institute Publications
City
Kalamazoo
ISBN
9781501513152
Keywords
Shakespeare, Spenser, English Renaissance literature, rhetoric, architecture, environment
Disciplines
Literature in English, British Isles
Citation for Published Book
Vaught, Jennifer C. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019.