Description
Book SynopsisHeather Hirschfeld recovers the historical specificity and the conceptual vigor of the term "satisfaction" as used in dramas of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Trade ReviewHirschfeld'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.
-- Kennth J.E. Graham * 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.
-- Dennis Taylor * 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.
-- William Junker * Comparative Drama *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Where's Satisfaction?
1. "Adew, to all Popish satisfactions": Reforming Repentance in Early Modern England
2. The Satisfactions of Hell: Doctor Faustus and the Descensus Tradition
3. Setting Things Right: The Satisfactions of Revenge
4. As Good as a Feast?: Playing (with) Enough on the Elizabethan Stage5. "Wooing, wedding, and repenting": The Satisfactions of
Marriage in Othello and Love’s Pilgrimage
Postscript: Where’s the Stage at the End of Satisfaction?
