Autore: Pikli, Natália
Titolo: The Prince and the Hobby-Horse: Shakespeare and the Ambivalence of Early Modern Popular Culture
Periodico: Journal of early modern studies
Anno: 2013 - Volume: 2 - Pagina iniziale: 119 - Pagina finale: 140

The Shakespearean hobby-horse, mentioned emphatically in Hamlet, brings into focus a number of problems related to early modern popular culture. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the word was characterised by semantic ambivalence, with simultaneously valid meanings of a breed of horse, a morris character, a foolish person, and a wanton woman. The overlapping of these meanings in different cultural discourses of the age (playtexts, emblem books, popular verse, pictures) exemplifies the interaction of different productions of early modern popular culture, from social humiliating practices to festivals and public playhouses. This attests to a complex circulation of cultural memory regarding symbols of popular culture, paradoxically both ‘forgotten’ and ‘remembered’ as a basically oral-ritual culture was transformed into written forms. In this context, the Hamletian passage gains new overtones, while the different versions of the playtext (Q1 & 2: 1603, 1604, F: 1623) also offer insights into the changing attitudes regarding popular culture, as it became gradually commercialised and politicised in the following decades. Finally, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair solidify a critical and sceptical attitude, which seems to have signalled the end of ‘Merry Old England’ on-stage and off-stage as well.


Premi sulle icone a fianco dei nomi per visualizzare i libri scritti dall'autore

---

---

SICI: 2279-7149(2013)2<119:TPATHS>2.0.ZU;2-Q
Testo completo: http://www.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/download/12631/11828

Esportazione dati in Refworks (solo per utenti abilitati)

Biblioteche ACNP che possiedono il periodico