1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910818730003321

Autore

Hirschfeld Heather Anne <1968->

Titolo

The end of satisfaction : drama and repentance in the age of Shakespeare / / Heather Anne Hirschfeld

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, New York : , : Cornell University Press, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

0-8014-7062-5

0-8014-7063-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (255 p.)

Disciplina

822/.309353

Soggetti

English drama - Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 - History and criticism

Repentance in literature

Desire in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Where's Satisfaction? -- 1. "Adew, to al Popish satisfactions": Reforming Repentance in Early Modern En gland -- 2. The Satisfactions of Hell: Doctor Faustus and the Descensus Tradition -- 3. Setting Things Right: The Satisfactions of Revenge -- 4. As Good as a Feast?: Playing (with) Enough on the Elizabethan Stage -- 5. "Wooing, wedding, and repenting": The Satisfactions of Marriage in Othello and Love's Pilgrimage -- Postscript: Where's the Stage at the End of Satisfaction? -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In The End of Satisfaction, Heather Hirschfeld recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term "satisfaction" during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the term's significance as an organizing principle of Christian repentance, she examines the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatized the consequences of its re- or de-valuation in the process of Reformation doctrinal change. The Protestant theology of repentance, Hirschfeld suggests, underwrote a variety of theatrical plots "to set things right" in a world shorn of the prospect of "making



enough" (satisfacere).Hirschfeld's semantic history traces today's use of "satisfaction"-as an unexamined measure of inward gratification rather than a finely nuanced standard of relational exchange-to the pressures on legal, economic, and marital discourses wrought by the Protestant rejection of the Catholic sacrament of penance (contrition, confession, satisfaction) and represented imaginatively on the stage. In so doing, it offers fresh readings of the penitential economies of canonical plays including Dr. Faustus, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello; considers the doctrinal and generic importance of lesser-known plays including Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Love's Pilgrimage; and opens new avenues into the study of literature and repentance in early modern England.