Provides a clearer understanding and interpretation of characters who suffer from mental and emotional extremities in Shakespearean drama.
Blurbs for Stages of Madness: sin, sickness and Seneca in Shakespearean drama Stages of Madness is an important new study of the representation of madness on the early modern English stage. Rigorously researched yet also highly readable, Power's book provides original and compelling close readings of early modern plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet while establishing a lineage of ideas about madness stemming from classical and medieval drama. Stages of Madness should be considered required reading for anyone interested in early modern drama as well as in premodern medical practice and intellectual history. Dr Rory Loughnane, Reader in Early Modern Studies, University of Kent Stages of Madness is an absolute must for the early modern bookshelf. Andrew J. Power propels the reader through an enlightened tour of madness. From the Bedlam-laden performance of Edgar in King Lear, through the schism-inflected demonic possession of The Comedy of Errors, to the furious revenge of Titus Andronicus, this book asks the biggest questions imaginable about the evolution of cultural understandings of how mind relates to self and how notions of sanity are constructed through the reflection of madness in religious and medical contexts. Dr Timothy Ryan Day, Associate Professor of English, Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus
Andrew J. Power teaches at the University of Sharjah, UAE. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin where he took his PhD (2006). He has taught in Trinity, at University College Dublin, the University of Cyprus, and Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus. He is the editor of The Birth and Death of the Author (2020) and of Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613 (2012) and Early Shakespeare, 1588-1594 (2020). He was the Research Dramaturge for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2017).