| Grant number: | 16/06723-2 |
| Support type: | Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctorate |
| Effective date (Start): | August 01, 2016 |
| Effective date (End): | October 31, 2018 |
| Field of knowledge: | Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures |
| Principal Investigator: | John Milton |
| Grantee: | Régis Augustus Bars Closel |
| Home Institution: | Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil |
| Associated scholarship(s): | 16/23470-0 - Land Politics in English Renaissance Drama, BE.EP.PD |
Abstract Extreme changes define the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. From the break with Rome to the English Civil War, comprehensive reforms reach central aspects of everyday life. Among them, there is a fundamental shift: the alteration in the relationship between land and society. The enclosure of the fields and the Dissolution of the Monasteries are two examples of historical events that culminate in social, economic, political and religious changes. Land is the basis in both the time before the Reformation and in the period that starts to take form over the early Modern Era. However, the ways of establishing a relation with land undergo a transformation: from a social relation nexus to a commercial exchange. Early Modern drama absorbs and transforms the many conflicts that have their origins and their consequences in these two events. Among them, there is the depiction of private space in opposition to public; socioeconomic rise and fall; the domestic environment; marriage and adultery; the clash between old rights and new customs; the space of the city and its commercial affairs, among others. The 1592 anonymous play, Arden of Faversham, is the most representative of these conflicts that have their very origin in the political shifts regarding the land. From the true history of a murder in the 1550s, the play explores the different conceptions of rights and ownership that emerge from the dissolution of monastic lands and the problems resulting from this action. Those that were previously associated to a patriarchal structure, in which land was once the core, unite with the wife and her lover against their landlord, someone who does not recognize the old land-based rights. Therefore, the play opens up a dramatic genre, "domestic tragedy" - that would strengthen only a decade later - and explores the crisis and pressures of the domestic microcosm, which ultimately resonate at other political levels. For that reason, it is a fundamental play due to its depiction of common-man struggles; exposition of institutional frailties; meditation on the transition between cultural values; and to give shape, for the first time, to a material that would be the basis of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Middleton and Heywood are a few of the dramatists that ventured into that dramatic realism that inquires into the oscillating everydayness of their period. This post-doctoral research-plan proposes the first translation of Arden of Faversham into Brazilian-Portuguese, as well as the accomplishment of some studies regarding the politics of land and the process of cultural-transition associated with the customs and the market present in the works of Middleton, Dekker and Shakespeare. | |