EARLY SHAKESPEARE · Shakespeare and the 1590s Style
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2011-01-01 → 2012-12-31
- EU contribution
- €232,083
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-IIF
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Results in brief
Shakespeare and the 1590s Style
Executive Summary: Dr Goran Stanivukovic's research on Early Shakespeare: Shakespeare and the late 1590s style gives a unique insight into the transmission of literature, cultural and historical influences across Europe in the early modern period. His original and innovative study of Shakespeare presents a unique instance of the English reception, absorption and and transmission of influences from the European humanist tradition; itself in turn in dialogue with texts, authors and ideas from the classical past. The project represents a fascinating study of transnational and trans-cultural transmission and transformation while also creating a new model for understanding these dynamic cultural patterns. Dr Goran Stanivukovic gives us a Europe-facing Shakespeare whose work can help us to reconnect vital strands of the humanist debates that ranged across early modern Europe and which drew vitality from the classical past. The project succeeds in its ambition to overturn an older tradition of literary scholarship that ignored or criticised Shakespeare's early work because it was judged to be over-reliant on rhetorical formulas. Instead, Dr Goran Stanivukovic gives us a Shakespeare who succeeds aesthetically precisely because his work is so porous to the European humanist tradition and so effective in its transmission and transformation of its influences. Dr Stanivukovic's main results consist of a significant enlargement of the cultural and historical context within which we understand Shakespeare's style. The project has shaped a Shakespeare influenced by Ovidian themes of transgression and transformation; by Italian texts such as Torquato Tasso and Matteo Boiardo (via Edmund Spenser); and by European conceptions of epic. In doing this, the project draws critical attention to neglected formal aspects of Shakespeare's work, in particular hyperbole and heroic style. The project findings were achieved via a combination of textual, historical, linguistic and anthropological methods. The project demonstrates the interplay between English and European humanist rhetoricians and between cultural and wider political and historical contexts. This blending of historicist and formalist methodology represents the state of the art in contemporary literary scholarship Project results and conclusions have been transmitted via conference presentations and other talks as well as via publications. The impact on the worldwide community of Shakespeare scholars has yet to be seen but is likely to be significant, based on the originality and innovation of the work. The project also models methods of studying pathways of cultural and intellectual exchange that are likely to be influential in their own right.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The project explores how the early style of Shakespeare's dramatic and non-dramatic works written before 1595, which remains one of the least explored areas in Shakespeare studies, was shaped through a range of influences that came from withing England, European tradition of rhetoric, and classical sources. Critics have often thought of that style in terms of form (language) only, not as a product of a complex interplay of historical, political, ideological, and artistic influences brining 'modernity' England. However, a comparative analysis of the style of Shakespeare's early works within the historical context, modern literary and critical theories, especially an interdisciplinary research involving rhetoric (language and style), history, religion, and visual arts (sculptures and paintings), and the contemporary theories of identity, performance, and nation formation will show that Shakespeare's early style was far more 'European' and 'humanist' in origin than it has been hitherto assumed because he relied heavily on two traditions available to him: one was the persistent influence of the classical and European humanist literature on the English tradition in the 1590s (the most important decade in the emergence in the formation of English literature) and the growing import of European style in the visual arts and architecture in England, which became apparent in London, when Shakespeare arrived there. I propose to write a monograph on this topic, and a major academic publisher in the UK has already expressed an interest in it, and I plan to organize an international conference at UC Cork and publish a volume of essays based on that conference. The study aims to develop a comparative and European approach to interpreting Shakespeare's early style as well as the idea of 'early' style in the aesthetics of the 1590s. One key aspect will be to use interdisciplinary and comparative approach to explore the differing European appraoches to stylistic formation.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK - NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, CORK · CorkCoordinatorIreland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union