Foundation
Scholars began detecting the religious allegories in the plays during the 1930s. Quotations from the Bible are used in 3,000 places as shown by professor Naseeb Shaheen, and 14 different translations are used. In a few places the playwright has translated the Book of Genesis using the original Hebrew. In addition, there are many other church and religious references. For example, in 1999 in his study of Julius Caesar, Professor Steve Sohmer argues that the playwright "set out to interrogate the truth of the Gospels". Similarly in 1988 Linda Hoff posited that Hamlet is entirely a religious allegory. According to the study by Peter Milward, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Richard III, Henry VIII all include detailed Apocalypse allegories.
Elizabethan literature routinely used allegories to communicate hidden meanings. Contemporary literary critics advised that instead of feasting on the verse, readers should look beneath the surface to "digest the allegory”, as Sir John Harington put it in the introduction to his translation of Orlando Furioso. State Decipherers sitting in audiences attempted to detect hidden meanings in the plays being staged, as recorded by Ben Jonson.
Read more about this topic: The Dark Lady Players
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“Remember that whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the foundation of before you are eighteen, you will never be master of while you breathe.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man’s subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman’s subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1907)
“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)