Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions [Hardcover]

Adam Max Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2006

Early modern historians now agree that revolutions in military technology, information technology, navigation, clockmaking, surveying, and many other technical fields exerted considerable influences on Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. Shakespeare and Technology examines the multifaceted impact of early modern technological revolutions on Shakespeare's dramaturgy. By reading the plays in their immediate technological contexts, Cohen offers new insights into some of Shakespeare's key metaphors, his methods of character development and plot development, his ideas about genre, his concept of theatrical space, and his views on the theater's role in society. The study finds that Shakespeare acknowledged long-standing stigmas associated with each of the technologies that defined his culture, and it highlights the ways in which characters described themselves and others as machines. Shakespeare and Technology should be of interest to literature scholars, early modern cultural historians, and historians of science and technology.
 

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Shakespeare and Technologyis a groundbreaking book. By exploring developments in cartography, military engineering, horology, navigation and mirror-manufacturing, this book maps out a new ‘historical metaphorics’ of Shakespearean drama during England’s ‘technology boom.’ While offering a new conceptual lexicon for examining Shakespeare’s relationship to early scientific practices and technologies, Cohen focuses on forms of production often elided in historicist accounts of drama, and thus redefines just what constitutes ‘material culture’ in the domain of literary study. As such, Shakespeare and Technology, will give Shakespearean scholars much food for thought in generations to come.”--Carla Mazzio, University of Chicago

“This is one of those rare scholarly works, a book that needed to be written, and which thereby expands our horizons whilst illuminating the familiar with an entirely new light. Almost every one of Cohen’s larger generalizations I find myself agreeing to, whilst the myriad of detailed evidence which he brings to play in tracing his central thesis of the impact of technology on late Elizabethan and Jacobean literary culture is not only fascinating in itself, but is deployed with elegance, and with a shrewd intelligence. The book presents such a mastery of sources and secondary literature that it will become, I think, a standard point of reference for anybody wanting to understand the wider intersection of technology and the imagination in the early-modern world. In this sense, the book will (and certainly should) command a much wider audience than the professional circuit of Shakespearians.”--Jonathan Sawday, University of Strathclyde

“Cohen’s new book brings to our attention an issue that has long been overlooked in Shakespeare studies--the impact of the machine on the playwright’s imaginative vision. Shakespeare and Technologyprovides us with key contexts for the plays, deeply researched and reconstructed, and it coordinates its rich contextualizations with a set of insightful comments on the plays themselves.”--Daniel Vitkus, Florida State University

“Cohen addresses the important technological changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how these changes manifested themselves in the language of Shakespeare’s plays. The approach to Shakespeare is especially timely in the context of modern debates over cybernetics, technology and subjectivity; debates that have shaped interdisciplinary work in modern literatures but remain under-investigated and under-theorized in the early modern era. Shakespeare and Technologyis of the highest quality in its research, argument, and its engagement with current work in early modern cultural studies.”--Mark Aune, North Dakota State University

About the Author

Adam Max Cohen is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he specializes in Shakespeare, early modern literature, and early modern cultural studies. His current research projects explore the intersections between early modern literary studies and the history of science and technology. He has published articles in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, The Sixteenth Century Journal, and The Wordsworth Circle, and he has contributed chapters to several essay collections.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (September 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403972060
• ISBN-13: 978-1403972064
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,917,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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