The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (Pretty Little Liars (eBook)) - Hardcover

Hirschfeld, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801452740 ISBN 13: 9780801452741

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In The End of Satisfaction, Heather Hirschfeld recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term "satisfaction" during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the term’s significance as an organizing principle of Christian repentance, she examines the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatized the consequences of its re- or de-valuation in the process of Reformation doctrinal change. The Protestant theology of repentance, Hirschfeld suggests, underwrote a variety of theatrical plots "to set things right" in a world shorn of the prospect of "making enough" (satisfacere).Hirschfeld’s semantic history traces today’s use of "satisfaction"―as an unexamined measure of inward gratification rather than a finely nuanced standard of relational exchange―to the pressures on legal, economic, and marital discourses wrought by the Protestant rejection of the Catholic sacrament of penance (contrition, confession, satisfaction) and represented imaginatively on the stage. In so doing, it offers fresh readings of the penitential economies of canonical plays including Dr. Faustus, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello; considers the doctrinal and generic importance of lesser-known plays including Enough Is as Good as a Feast and Love’s Pilgrimage; and opens new avenues into the study of literature and repentance in early modern England.

About this title

Review:

"Hirschfeld's readings are consistently imaginative and challenging. Her book is the product of wide reading and deep and sustained thinking and does enough to satisfy this reader."

Author: Kennth J.E. Graham Source: Early Theatre

"One mark of a good critical book is that it creates a minifield and brings together disparate scholarship into new connections. This characterizes Heather Hirschfield's new book, which coalesces around the term "satisfaction." If the subject were only the satisfaction for sin discussed by theology, the result might be predictable. But Hirschfield connects theological satisfaction with an unexpected context, the Rolling Stones’ "I can’t get no satisfaction," a playful connection that is, in fact, productive."

Author: Dennis Taylor Source: Renaissance Quarterly

"Part of the book's achievment is that the questions it continually seems to elicit from the reader are as suprising as Hirshcfield's own argument is provocative.... The End of Satisfaction makes a real contribution to our sense of how changing theologies of penitence were registered by the culture―and especially drama―of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England."

Author: William Junker Source: Comparative Drama

"The End of Satisfaction will become a touchstone for future debates over the legacy of the Reformation on the early modern stage and the role played there by satisfaction in the widest sense of the word. Heather Hirschfeld handles beautifully both the continuities and the discontinuities between late medieval and Reformed thinking. Her treatment of revenge tragedy is a tour de force."

Author: John Parker, University of Virginia, author of The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe

"Heather Hirschfeld is an astute reader of early modern English dramatic texts and an authoritative voice on the wide-ranging effects of the Reformation on English literary culture (and vice versa). In The End of Satisfaction, Hirschfeld turns her sharp attention to the theological idea of satisfaction and its doctrinal ramifications across a host of related experiences and discourses―the question of hell, the impossibility of fulfillment through revenge, financial repayment, and the social and psychic costs of marriage."

Author: Gail Kern Paster, author of The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England

From the Back Cover:

In Rosewood, news vans lurk outside gated drives and FBI agents are knocking on every mansion door--and it's all because four very pretty liars simply don't know how to be good. Spencer, Hanna, Emily, and Aria have been keeping killer secrets for an entire year . . . things that could land them in jail if A ever told. And now A has.

One by one, the girls' worst deeds come out, and their worlds come crashing down around them. Spencer gets kicked out of Princeton. Hanna gets kicked out of her dad's campaign--and his heart. Emily gets kicked to the curb. And Aria may get kicked out of the country.

The girls are the lowest they've ever been. They've lost everything. But A's not done yet. If A's deadly plan succeeds, the liars will have told their last lie. . . .

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0801452740
• ISBN 13: 9780801452741
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256