Publisher's Synopsis
This work reads six of Shakespeare's plays in the context of Church and Church-state politics of the 1590s and of the first decade of the reign of James I, demonstrating that he replicates the idioms and rhetoric of Church-state politics in all of them.;The plays involved are "King John", "Comedy of Errors", "Twelfth Night", "Measure for Measure", "Cymbeline" and "Henry VIII". The author argues that reading the plays in the context of the position-taking that characterizes polemical discourse allows the reader to describe how Shakespeare positioned his plays in relation to these controversies.;This positioning turned on issues of authority and obedience, and involved such matters as religious conformity, the form of Church government, the jurisdiction of the temporal and spiritual courts and the sources of the monarch's power. Also, always at issue, are the period's most important rhetorics of subjectivity, including those of property, conscience and obedience.
