Cover Image
QR Code

In the Mean Season: Richard II and the Nostalgic Politics of Hospitality.

In Shakespeare's Richard II, the language of absent hospitality refracts the dire economic and food crises facing mid-1590s England, and it interrogates the contemporary response to the problem of dearth through its use of images of desolation, dearth, and grief. As absent hospitality proves to be a...

Full description

Published in:Parergon Vol. 33; no. 2; pp. 57 - 79
Main Author: Johanson, Kristine
Format: Literary Criticism
Published: Australian & New Zealand Association for Medieval & Early Modern Studies 2016
Subjects:
Richard II (Play : Shakespeare)
Nostalgia in literature
Hospitality in literature
Food shortages
Political participation in literature
Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
History
Northumberland (England)
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:In Shakespeare's Richard II, the language of absent hospitality refracts the dire economic and food crises facing mid-1590s England, and it interrogates the contemporary response to the problem of dearth through its use of images of desolation, dearth, and grief. As absent hospitality proves to be a consequence of tyranny, the idealised past is invoked as a model for political action, to reclaim what is lost for the future. The respective future-oriented nostalgias if Gaunt and Northumberland articulate that possibility of reclamation, which Richard II ultimately rejects in its suspicion of past, present, andfuture.