1st Edition
Drama and the Politics of Generational Conflict in Shakespeare's England
Drama and the Politics of Generational Conflict in Shakespeare’s England examines the intersection between art and culture and explains how ideas about age circulated in early modern England. Stephannie Gearhart illustrates how a variety of texts – including drama by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton – placed elders’ and youths’ voices in dialogue with one another to construct the period’s ideology of age and shape elder-youth relations.
Introduction: historicizing generational conflict
Part I: Youth
1. Blood vs. manners: youth’s quest for independence in The Merchant of Venice
2. Familial contracts: financial inheritance in the plays of Jonson and Middleton
Part II: Elders
3. "The very latest counsel that ever I shall breathe": 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, and ideological inheritance
4 Old fools and serpents’ teeth: defining age and the terms of the parent-child relationship in King Lear
Conclusion: A difficult age
Index
Biography
Stephannie S. Gearhart is an Associate Professor at Bowling Green State University, USA.
