Richard C. McCoy – författare

Speculation about Shakespeare's own religious beliefs and responses to the Reformation have dominated discussions of faith in the playwright's work for decades. As a result, we often lose sight of what's truly important-the plays themselves. By focusing on those plays in several succinct, fluently written chapters, Richard McCoy reminds us of the spell-binding power inherent in works like Othello, As You Like It, and The Winter's Tale and shows why they continue to cause audiences to gladly exercise what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief."Faith in Shakespeare ruminates on what it means to believe in the Bard's plays, exploring how their plots can be both preposterous and gripping, and how their characters seem more substantial and enduring than the people surrounding us in the theater. Informed by Coleridge's "poetic faith," the book discusses what this concept shares with religious faith and how it departs from recent historicist approaches to the dramatist's work. Faith in Shakespeare concentrates more on text than context, finding the afterlife of Shakespeare's language more vivid and engaging than theological controversies. The book confirms its convictions in literature's intrinsic powers by exploring the causes for our paradoxical belief in theater's potent but manifest illusions. Plays that ask their audience to "awake your faith" or "believe then, if you please" ultimately enable us to "mind true things by what their mockeries be." Rather than faith in God or the supernatural, McCoy argues that faith in Shakespeare is sustained and explained only by the complex, subtle, and entirely human power of poetic eloquence and dramatic performance.

The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry by Richard C. McCoy examines how the ceremonial culture of Elizabethan chivalry both mediated and exposed tensions at the heart of Tudor politics. Focusing on the careers of the Earl of Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney, and the Earl of Essex, McCoy shows how tournaments, tilts, and other courtly performances were more than rituals of devotion to the crown: they became arenas in which aristocratic ambition, militarism, and claims of “customary rights” were dramatized against royal authority. From Bullingbrook’s challenge in *Richard II* to Essex’s abortive rebellion, McCoy traces the ways in which chivalric “rites” embodied unresolved conflicts between honor and obedience, producing ceremonies that could temporarily balance crown and nobility but also threaten to destabilize the Elizabethan polity.Alongside historical events, McCoy analyzes the literature of Elizabethan chivalry, from masques and tournament devices by George Gascoigne, Francis Bacon, and others to the grander poetic projects of Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser, and Shakespeare. Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s concept of symbolic action, he situates these texts as cultural strategies that attempted to reconcile political contradictions—even when they failed or were overwhelmed by the realities of faction and rebellion. Daniel’s *Civil Wars* falters under the weight of contemporary conflict, while Spenser’s *Faerie Queene* more successfully transforms ideological contradictions into symbolic syntheses. Shakespeare’s histories, too, dramatize chivalry’s ambivalence, at once affirming royal power and highlighting aristocratic resistance. By reading Elizabethan chivalry as both ideology and symbolic practice, McCoy reveals how its ceremonies and literature prepared the ground for later constitutional struggles, making this study essential for scholars of early modern literature, political culture, and the intersections of ritual, power, and representation.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.