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Being and Having in Shakespeare

Katharine Eisaman Maus author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:14th Feb '13

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Being and Having in Shakespeare cover

What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare's plays engage with this question, elaborating a 'poetics of property' centering on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, and of the different opportunities afforded by access to land and to chattel property. Being and Having in Shakespeare considers these presentations of ownership and authority. Richard II and the Henry IV plays construe sovereignty as a form of property right, largely construing imperium, or the authority over persons in a polity, as a form of dominium, the authority of the propertyholder. Nonetheless, what property means changes considerably from Richard's reign to Henry's, as the imagined world of the plays is reconfigured to include an urban economy of chattel consumables. The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and Henry IV, part 1, reimagines, in comic terms, some of the same issues broached in the history plays. It focuses in particular on the problem of the daughter's inheritance and on the different property obligations among kin, friends, business associates, and spouses. In the figure of the 'vagabond king', theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, Henry VI, part 2 and King Lear both coordinate problems of entitlement with conundrums about distributive justice, raising fundamental questions about property relations and social organization.

admirable [and] innovative ... Maus is never reductive. Her grasp of the legal intricacies is complete. This is a book that knows the difference between dominium and seisin, between escheat and forfeiture ... groundbreaking. * John Kerrigan, London Review of Books *
Maus's taut, original readings of the plays certainly belie Parvini's claim that historicism is boring. * Julia Reinhard Lupton, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
This remarkable book, based on her Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, is a splendid adjunct to Maus's classic Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. * James P. Bednarz, Little Reviews a *
Recommended. * P. Kujoory, CHOICE *

ISBN: 9780199698004

Dimensions: 203mm x 135mm x 20mm

Weight: 272g

150 pages