Rewriting the Renaissance
by Margaret W Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers
This contains a particularly important essay by Louis Montrose called ‘Shaping Fantasies’ which is about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What was new about it was the way that Montrose brought A Midsummer Night’s Dream into contact with Elizabeth I. I think once you start thinking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in relation to Elizabeth the play looks quite different and it gives you a new insight into how people were feeling about her at the time. This was a new move that Montrose made in the 80s which has been hugely influential and has led to lots of other readings of Shakespeare’s plays to shed light on her reign.
Recommendations from our site
“This is an essay collection from the mid 1980s and it exemplifies the movement known as new historicism, which was a new development which tried to bring together history and literary criticism in a new dynamic way, to show the way that literature is situated in history and history is made up of texts and always open to interpretation.” Read more...
Helen Hackett, Historian
