1st Edition
The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama Icon of Opposition
The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama historicizes the Tower of London's evolving meanings in English culture alongside its representations in twenty-four English history plays, 1579-c.1634, by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others. While Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I fashioned the Tower as a showplace of royal authority, magnificence, and entertainment, many playwrights of the time revealed the Tower's instability as a royal symbol and represented it, instead, as an emblem of opposition to the crown and as a bodily and spiritual icon of non-royal English identity.
List of Images
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Introduction: Historicizing Original Tower Play Audiences
Chapter Two: The Tower of London as a Cultural Icon before the Tower Plays
Chapter Three: Stage vs. State: The Struggle for the Tower
Chapter Four: The Tower of London: Dramatic Emblem of Opposition
Chapter Five: Reading English Nationhood in the Dramatic Tower of London
Coda: The Tower of London: An Evolving Icon
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Kristen Deiter is Assistant Professor of English at Tennessee Technological University, USA.
"This text offers a provocative and careful study that reassesses the role of the Tower of London by examining the architectural building as a theatrical showplace and an icon of terror in the early modern period. Deiter does a wonderful job of establishing that dramatic representations of the Tower expanded its iconographic meaning by focusing on the Tower as a site of instability, rather than of royal authority. She places her analysis within a larger historical context and a reading of a significant number of cultural artifacts, including diaries, portraits, tracts, poetry, ballads, and woodcuts…Readers interested in scholarship on cultural studies of architecture, artifacts, and the theater as a place for commentary on social and political dissent will find Deiter’s book of particular interest as it makes important contributions to each of these realms of inquiry." --Anne-Marie E. Schuler, Ohio State University, Sixteenth Century Journal
