Research Catalog

Title

Treason by words : literature, law, and rebellion in Shakespeare's England / Rebecca Lemon.

Author

Lemon, Rebecca, 1968-

Publication

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2006.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

ix, 234 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

"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."--Jacket.

Uniform Title

Project Muse UPCC books

Subject

• English drama > 17th century > History and criticism
• English drama > Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 > History and criticism
• Great Britain > History > Elizabeth, 1558-1603
• Gunpowder Plot, 1605
• Literature and state > Great Britain > History > 16th century
• Literature and state > Great Britain > History > 17th century
• Treason in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-222) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Sovereignty, treason law, and the political imagination in early modern England -- The treason of Hayward's Henry IV -- Shakespeare's anatomy of resistance in Richard II -- Scaffolds of treason in Shakespeare's Macbeth -- Donne's Pseudo-martyr and post Gunpowder Plot law -- Treason and emergency power in Jonson's Catiline.

ISBN

• 0801444284 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 9780801444289

LCCN

^^2005032277

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library