Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare

"The term "secular" readily inspires thinking about disenchantment, periodization, modernity, and subjectivity. "Rethinking the Secular in the Age of Shakespeare" argues that Shakespeare's plays present "secularization" not only as a historical narrative of progress but also as a hermeneutic process that unleashes complex and often problematic transactions between sacred and secular that shape ideas about everything from pastoral government and performative language to wonder and the spatial imagination. At the heart of this volume is the conviction that thinking about Shakespeare and secularization also involves thinking about how to interpret history and temporality in the contexts of Shakespeare's medieval past, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, and the critical dispositions that define Shakespeare studies as a scholarly field today. Inspired by, but also challenging, the "religious turn" in early modern studies as well as master narratives of secularization, our contributors reject a necessary opposition between "sacred" and "secular" and instead analyze how these categories intersect. In fresh analyses of plays ranging from "Hamlet" and "The Tempest" to "All's Well that Ends Well" and "All Is True," secularization emerges as an interpretive act that raises questions about the cultural protocols of representation within both Shakespeare's plays and the critical domains in which they are studied and taught. The volume's diverse disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches shift our focus from literal religion and doctrinal issues to such aspects of early modern culture as theatrical performance, geography, race, architecture, music, and the visual arts"--Provided by publisher.