Against the background of an increasing proliferation of multimedia resources and tools for digitally assisted analysis, this essay focuses on the new horizons they promise to disclose in early modern literary and cultural studies. In this perspective, the essay illustrates how the powerful symbolism and far-reaching implications of moon discourses in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – ranging from John Lily’s The Woman in the Moon (1597), Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596) and The Tempest (1611-1612), to Ben Jonson’s masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620) – may benefit from a digital humanities approach. More specifically, light is shed on the broader hermeneutic horizons disclosed by archives of primary resources and multimedia materials, including the English Broadside Ballad Archive and the Early English Books Online, and instruments of lexical analysis available on the web, such as Lexicons of Early Modern English.
"I was th' Man in the Moon": Astronomical Discourses in Early Modern Drama. Notes on a DIgital Humanities Approach
Maddalena Alessandra Squeo
2020-01-01
Abstract
Against the background of an increasing proliferation of multimedia resources and tools for digitally assisted analysis, this essay focuses on the new horizons they promise to disclose in early modern literary and cultural studies. In this perspective, the essay illustrates how the powerful symbolism and far-reaching implications of moon discourses in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama – ranging from John Lily’s The Woman in the Moon (1597), Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-1596) and The Tempest (1611-1612), to Ben Jonson’s masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620) – may benefit from a digital humanities approach. More specifically, light is shed on the broader hermeneutic horizons disclosed by archives of primary resources and multimedia materials, including the English Broadside Ballad Archive and the Early English Books Online, and instruments of lexical analysis available on the web, such as Lexicons of Early Modern English.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
