Treason by words
Subtitle: literature, law, and rebellion in Shakespeare's England
By: Rebecca Lemon.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Ithaca, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780801444289
Subjects: English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism; English drama -- 17th century -- History and criticism; Treason in literature; Literature and state -- Great Britain -- History -- 16th century; Literature and state -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century; Gunpowder Plot, 1605; Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603
Description: "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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Sovereignty, treason law, and the political imagination in early modern England; title: The treason of Hayward's Henry IV; title: Shakespeare's anatomy of resistance in Richard II; title: Scaffolds of treason in Shakespeare's Macbeth; title: Donne's Pseudo-martyr and post Gunpowder Plot law; title: Treason and emergency power in Jonson's Catiline.