2004 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
From Sin to Crime : A Study of Early Modem English Ballads, Pamphlets, and Drama
| Project/Area Number |
13610547
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
英語・英米文学
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| Research Institution | Iwate University |
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Principal Investigator |
SAKAINO Naoki Iwate University, Faculty of Education, Associate Professor, 教育学部, 助教授 (90187005)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2001 – 2004
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| Keywords | representation of 'otherness' / English Renaissance / English theater / popular culture |
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| Research Abstract |
This study originally aimed at deeper and wider understandings of contexts surrounding early modern English city comedies. The conflicts to be dealt with in those dramas drastically shifts from that between the God and Everyman in early modern religious plays and Interludes, while late Elizabethan and Jacobean city comedies seeks their fuel for plot-driving conflicts in human-human relationships over economical monster called Capitalism. That is, Capitalism transforms the Crime-Punishment-Salvation scheme in religious plays into that between those who have and those who owes, which leads to the advance of outsiders or drop-outs of economical system -they, as newly invented enemy to the society, would accordingly be treated as outsiders of social order. Thus many secular pamphlets and ballads treat such outsiders as "strangers" : they are signified with strange tongue called 'pedlers French' and through the course of pamphlet journalism, they are transformed from the threat to the socie
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ty to comical scapegoats.
Significantly enough, such minor pamphlets gradually build up the mainstream history ; at last, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle contains William Harrison's adaptation of Thomas Harman's 'Canting Dictionary', which, however, further goes back to John Awdelay at nearest. History with large 'H" thus sometimes contributes to the fabrication of outsiders : Gypsies, Pedlers, or other economic 'minorities' to be systematically excluded and banned by the rest of the society.
The form of pamphlets is no less important than its contents : two sets of characters (i. e. English (Black letters) and Roman (white letters) coexist. While most of those pamphlets are printed with Black letter, Pedlers French are shown with Roman characters. With the cases of Vulgate Bible or writings of Christian Humanism, Roman letters would potentially carry some connotation of 'not necessarily-desired new trends for variety of human intellect.'
As for ballads which tend to be conservative in its nature, both old and new discourses concerning Sin and crime could naturally be co-operated to form a strong basso-continuo which supports the 'moral' of the pamphlets. On dramas, we would see such pedlers treated as wise fools, malcontents, or Tom of Bedlam ; that might somehow signifies the drawbacks of 'moral scale'. In short, some dramas restores those seeming outsiders' honor and virtue, also in comic atmosphere. Less
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Research Products
(6 results)
