Sovereign amity : figures of friendship in Shakespearean contexts
Shannon demonstrates that the likeness of sex and station urged in friendship enabled a civic parity not present in other social forms. Early modern friendship was nothing less than a utopian political discourse. It preceded the advent of liberal thought, and it made its case in the terms of gender, eroticism, counsel, and kingship. To show the power of friendship in early modernity, Shannon ranges widely among translations of classical essays the works of Elizabeth I, Montaigne, Donne, and Bacon and popular literature, to focus finally on the plays of Shakespeare. Her study will interest scholars of literature, history, gender, sexuality, and political thought, and anyone interested in a general account of the English Renaissance. Renaissance formulations of friendship typically cast the friend as "another self" and idealized a pair of friends as "one soul in two bodies." Laurie Shannon's Sovereign Amity puts this stress on the likeness of friends into context and offers a historical account of its place in English culture and politics
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xiii, 240 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780226749662, 9780226749679, 0226749665, 0226749673
46713061
Prologue: "soveraigne mistris amitie"
The early modern politics of likeness: sovereign reader/subjects and listening kings
Chaste associations in Cary's Tragedy of Mariam: sexual mixtures, same-sex friendship, and the genders of integrity
Professing friendship: erotic prerogatives and "human title" in The two noble kinsmen
Ungoverned states: Friendship, mignonnerie, and the private monarch
The false prince and the true subject: friendship and public institutions in Edward II and The Henriad
Friendship's offices: true speech and artificial bodies in The winter's tale
Epilogue: Magna civitas; Magna solitudo: bureaucratic forms and civic conditions