Deception in Elizabethan Comedy

An Elizabethan Enigma

The last thing William Shakespeare wants to be is predictable. Roughly halfway through his published collection of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, he frets that we may find it dull that he “write[s] . . . all one, ever the same,” producing one fourteen-line poem after another (76.5). He has reason to worry: he rarely allows himself to deviate from a strict iambic pentameter, and holds his v...

Elizabethan Dyetary of health

John Banister: an Elizabethan surgeon in Brazil.

In Brazil's sixteenth-century history, very few references are made to health professionals. On the expedition of Edward Fenton, dispatched by the English Crown in 1582 to set up a trading post in Asia, was the famous barber-surgeon and physician John Banister. The naval squadron, diverted from its original route to repeat the feats of Sir Francis Drake, stopped over in Africa, crossed the Atla...

The Elizabethan Idea of Empire

This paper argues that the English idea of empire in the reign of Elizabeth I was derivative, belated and incoherent. Its sources were classical and continental rather than indigenous. It arose more than a century after the Scottish monarchy had elaborated its own conception of empire. Moreover, it expressed a sense of backwardness, isolation and anxiety that mirrored the English failure to est...

Aristotle's Theory of Comedy

<193>Aristotle, in his Poetics, claimed that tragedy, “through pity and fear, accomplishes the catharsis of such emotions (di j ejlevou kai; fovbou peraivnousa th;n tw'n toiouvtwn paqhmavtwn kavqarsin) (Poet. 1449b27f.) .” It has been argued that the medical purgation theory of the musical catharsis in Politics is the key phrase for the interpretation of tragic catharsis, where he says, those w...