English Renaissance in Popular Culture

GREGORY M. COLÓN SEMENZA Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA.

• Introduction; G.M.C.Semenza PART I: RENAISSANCE ICONS  Desperate Housewives: The Tudors , the Politics of Historiography and the Beautiful Body of Jonathan Rhys Meyers; R.Wray The Secret Life of Elizabeth I; A. L. Eastwood Where Maps End: Elizabeth: The Golden Age of Simulacra;  C.Lehmann PART II: RENAISSANCE FANTASIES Looking Up to the Groundlings in Contemporary Historical Fiction; A.Rodgers London's Burning: Remembering Guy Fawkes in V for Vendetta; M.Croteau Reading the Early Modern Witch in Horror Films of the 1960s and 70s; D.Willis Sportful Combat Gets Medieval: The Representation of Historical Violence at Renaissance Fairs; K.J.Wetmore, Jr. PART III: RENAISSANCE SOUNDS The First Adaptation of Shakespeare and the 'Recovery' of the Renaissance Voice: Sam Taylor's The Taming of the Shrew; D.Cartmell God Save the Queene: Sex Pistols, Shakespeare, and Punk [Anti-] History; G.M.C.Semenza Part IV: RENAISSANCE CINEMA Jacques Rivette's Film Adaptation as 'Dérive-ation': Pericles in Paris Belongs to Us and  The Revenger's Tragedy in Noroit; R. Burt Alex Cox's Revenger's Tragedy and the Foreclosure of Apocalyptic Teleology; J. Keller Forget Film: Speculations on Shakespearean Entertainment Value; D.Hedrick

"With admirable breadth and wit, The English Renaissance in Popular Culture illuminates how far modern mass culture's fascination with its counterpart, the culture of early modern England, extends beyond Shakespeare. The range of materials explored - from silent film to punk music, The Tudors TV series to Renaissance fairs, historical fiction to horror films - is especially praiseworthy, as is the critical intelligence and ingenuity with which the contributors analyze how our own culture has been shaped by imaginative and often surprising identifications with the English Renaissance. The intersection of Renaissance scholarship and contemporary cultural studies in this well-conceived collection makes for a thought-provoking, exciting, timely and original contribution to study of the English past in the popular present." - Douglas M. Lanier, Professor of English, University of New Hampshire