Shakespeare and his social context : essays in osmotic knowledge and literary interpretation /

Designed to place Shakespeare's text within English Renaissance culture, this study proffers ``osmotic knowledge''-the moral and behavioral background that a reasonable man ``should somehow have learned, or at least understood''-as a backdrop. For example, Much Ado and All's Well are examined in light of 16th- and 17th-century matrimonial laws; Errors, Shrew, and Othello are informed by courtesy books and conduct literature; Lucrece is portrayed as a ``defeated soldier ... whose moral purpose has been destroyed in the `havoc' wrought upon the holy city of her body''; and the significance of Richard II's deposition is clarified in light of chivalric and military rites of degradation. This study avoids some central questions now plaguing the New Historicists: How do we know which texts Shakespeare appropriated and which he resisted? Given that treatises were spewed forth in the midst of controversy, how can we select any one document or set of documents as a framework for a particular play? How does such a framework affect our reading of the work itself? Though Ranald never probes the assumptions upon which her work is based, her readings are informative and useful. The book's most appropriate audience would be graduate students and upper-division undergraduates.-V.M. Vaughan, Clark University