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Shakespeare’s Literary Lives
by Paul FranssenThis is an entertaining account of Shakespeare's afterlives in fiction. Paul Franssen offers the first sustained analysis of stories and films that involve the character of Shakespeare. Taking a broad international and historical perspective, he shows how fictions about Shakespeare help us understand what he meant to a certain age, nation, or author, and how they have become a vital aspect of the Shakespeare industry. Appearing sometimes as a ghost or time-traveller, fictional Shakespeares have been made to speak to many issues, such as the French Revolution, the Irish conflict, colonialism, the Anglo-American relationship, sexual orientation, race and class. Written in an accessible style, this book will appeal to advanced students as well as academic researchers in Shakespeare studies, film and cultural studies, literary reception and creative writing.
Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth
by Charles Beauclerk“A book for anyone who loves Shakespeare . . . One of the most scandalous and potentially revolutionary theories about the authorship of these immortal works” (Mark Rylance, First Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre). It is perhaps the greatest story never told: the truth behind the most enduring works of literature in the English language, perhaps in any language. Who was William Shakespeare? Critically acclaimed historian Charles Beauclerk has spent more than two decades researching the authorship question, and if the plays were discovered today, he argues, we would see them for what they are—shocking political works written by a court insider, someone with the monarch’s indulgence, shielded from repression in an unstable time of armada and reformation. But the author’s identity was quickly swept under the rug after his death. The official history—of an uneducated merchant writing in near obscurity, and of a virginal queen married to her country—dominated for centuries. Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom delves deep into the conflicts and personalities of Elizabethan England, as well as the plays themselves, to tell the true story of the “Soul of the Age.” “Beauclerk’s learned, deep scholarship, compelling research, engaging style and convincing interpretation won me completely. He has made me view the whole Elizabethan world afresh. The plays glow with new life, exciting and real, infused with the soul of a man too long denied his inheritance.” —Sir Derek Jacobi
Shakespeare's Lyric Stage: Myth, Music, and Poetry in the Last Plays
by Seth LererWhat does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances—which should invite consolation, revelation, and connection—somehow fall short of the listener’s expectations? As Seth Lerer shows in this pioneering book, Shakespeare’s late plays invite us to contemplate that very question, offering up lyric as a displaced and sometimes desperate antidote to situations of duress or powerlessness. Lerer argues that the theme of lyric misalignment running throughout The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, and Cymbeline serves a political purpose, a last-ditch effort at transformation for characters and audiences who had lived through witch-hunting, plague, regime change, political conspiracies, and public executions. A deep dive into the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book also explores what Shakespearean lyric is able to recuperate for these “victims of history” by virtue of its disjointed utterances. To this end, Lerer establishes the concept of mythic lyricism: an estranging use of songs and poetry that functions to recreate the past as present, to empower the mythic dead, and to restore a bit of magic to the commonplaces and commodities of Jacobean England. Reading against the devotion to form and prosody common in Shakespeare scholarship, Lerer’s account of lyric utterance’s vexed role in his late works offers new ways to understand generational distance and cultural change throughout the playwright’s oeuvre.
Shakespeare's Mad Men: A Crisis of Authority (Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities)
by Richard van OortThis book is about a mad king and a mad duke. With original and iconoclastic readings, Richard van Oort pioneers the reading of Shakespeare as an ethical thinker of the "originary scene," the scene in which humans became conscious of themselves as symbol-using moral and narrative beings. Taking King Lear and Measure for Measure as case studies, van Oort shows how the minimal concept of an anthropological scene of origin—the "originary hypothesis"—provides the basis for a new understanding of every aspect of the plays, from the psychology of the characters to the ethical and dialogical conflicts upon which the drama is based. The result is a gripping commentary on the plays. Why does Lear abdicate and go mad? Why does Edgar torture his father with non-recognition? Why does Lucio accuse the Duke in Measure for Measure of madness and lechery, and why does Isabella remain silent at the end? In approaching these and other questions from the perspective of the originary hypothesis, van Oort helps us to see the ethical predicament of the plays, and, in the process, makes Shakespeare new again.
Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage
by Kurt A. SchreyerIn Shakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare’s connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city’s cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects—as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors—to the Shakespearean stage. As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare’s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare’s stage—including the ass’s head of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth—were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.
Shakespeare’s Mirrors (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Edward EvansClear mirrors and The Geneva Bible, revolutionary innovations of the Elizabethan age, inspired Shakespeare’s drive towards a new purpose for drama. Shakespeare reversed the conventional mirror metaphor for drama, implying drama cannot reflect the substance of human nature, and developed a method of characterization, through metadrama, self-awareness and soliloquy, to project St. Paul’s idea of conscience onto the Elizabethan stage. This revolutionary method of characterization, aesthetic existence beyond performance, has long been sensed but remains frustratingly uncategorized. Shakespeare’s Mirrors charts the invention of a drama that staged the unstageable: St. Paul’s metaphysical conception of human nature glimpsed through a looking glass darkly.
Shakespeare's Montaigne
by Peter G. Platt Stephen Greenblatt John Florio Michel De MontaigneAn NYRB Classics OriginalShakespeare, Nietzsche wrote, was Montaigne's best reader--a typically brilliant Nietzschean insight, capturing the intimate relationship between Montaigne's ever-changing record of the self and Shakespeare's kaleidoscopic register of human character. And there is no doubt that Shakespeare read Montaigne--though how extensively remains a matter of debate--and that the translation he read him in was that of John Florio, a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and dazzlingly inventive writer himself.Florio's Montaigne is in fact one of the masterpieces of English prose, with a stylistic range and felicity and passages of deep lingering music that make it comparable to Sir Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. This new edition of this seminal work, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, features an adroitly modernized text, an essay in which Greenblatt discusses both the resemblances and real tensions between Montaigne's and Shakespeare's visions of the world, and Platt's introduction to the life and times of the extraordinary Florio. Altogether, this book provides a remarkable new experience of not just two but three great writers who ushered in the modern world.
Shakespeare's Nigga
by Joseph Jomo PierreShakespeare holds the fate of several black slaves in his hands. Among them are the rebellious Aaron and the obedient Othello, who each have complicated relationships with Shakespeare's daughter, Judith. But a vital secret remains hidden that could untangle complex familial ties and change the course of their history.
Shakespeare's Once and Future Child: Speculations on Sovereignty
by Joseph CampanaA study of Shakespeare’s child figures in relation to their own political moment, as well as our own. Politicians are fond of saying that “children are the future.” How did the child become a figure for our political hopes? Joseph Campana’s book locates the source of this idea in transformations of childhood and political sovereignty during the age of Shakespeare, changes spectacularly dramatized by the playwright himself. Shakespeare’s works feature far more child figures—and more politically entangled children—than other literary or theatrical works of the era. Campana delves into this rich corpus to show how children and childhood expose assumptions about the shape of an ideal polity, the nature of citizenship, the growing importance of population and demographics, and the question of what is or is not human. As our ability to imagine viable futures on our planet feels ever more limited, and as children take up legal proceedings to sue on behalf of the future, it behooves us to understand the way past child figures haunt our conversations about intergenerational justice. Shakespeare offers critical precedents for questions we still struggle to answer.
Shakespeare's Original Stage Conditions and their Afterlives across the Globe: From the Wooden O to the Yards of Seoul (Global Shakespeares)
by Yu Jin KoThis book brings together two separate fields by combining a study of Shakespeare's original stage conditions with an exploration of his plays in performance across the globe. The book contributes new insights into how early-modern stage conditions shaped the writing, production, and reception of Shakespeare's plays, but takes the further step of examining how original stage conditions re-emerge, not only in Globe replicas like the London Globe, but in unexpected and sometimes unconscious reconfigurations in adaptations and productions from around the world: film versions of Othello from Mexico to India that take dancing cues and anxieties about dance from the play and centralize dance; Korean adaptations for the madang (or yard) that reimagine Shakespeare's theatrical spaces and their relationships to audiences; Noh re-imaginings on film and onstage that foreground the theatrical; a teen film remake of Othello that raises questions about how blackness is figured today and on Shakespeare's stage, among others. By studying original stage conditions and their global afterlives, the book illuminates how global productions negotiate historical and cultural differences and thereby, paradoxically, engage with the cultural specificities of the present.
Shakespeare's Othello: A Graphic Novel (Classics in Graphics #8)
by Steve Barlow Steve SkidmoreShakespeare's Othello like you've never seen it - or read it - before! Classics in Graphics: Othello has been adapted into a graphic novel by expert authors, Steve Skidmore and Steve Barlow, with illustrations by Kevin Hopgood and Martyn Cain. Watch Iago's slimy plan play out like an irresistible thriller - as Othello's self-doubt turns to fury and becomes more and more consuming.Classics in Graphics is a series of graphic novels for readers aged 10 plus that has inclusion at its heart, flinging wide the doors of literature for all to enter and understand. Including dyslexia-friendly design and encouraging readers to relate to iconic roles - casting spells, falling in love and winning duels. Each graphic novel includes pitch-perfect illustrations for depicting tragedy, romance, comedy or magic PLUS: - snappy simplified text presenting Shakespeare's themes clearly - introductory materials to help set the scene and context of each story - heaps of extra material at the back to keep the learning and fun going, including an exploration of themes in the play, the language, Shakespeare's inspirations, the publication and performance of the play in history, a timeline of Shakespeare's life and works, and much more! Plays available in the series include: Macbeth, The Tempest, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Twelfth NightPraise for Classics in Graphics: "[...] an encouraging entry point to Shakespeare for my kids, and [...] an excellent job converting challenging language and literary themes to make it very inclusive, smoothing ease of understanding dialogue, plot, and narration without dumbing it down." - EricWilliamson, leagueofcomicgeeks.com
Shakespeare's Other Language (Routledge Library Editions: Study of Shakespeare)
by Ruth NevoShakespeare’s last plays, the tragicomic Romances, are notoriously strange plays, riddled with fabulous events and incredible coincidences, magic and dream. These features have sometimes been interpreted as the carelessness of an of an aging dramatist weary of his craft, or justified as folklore motifs, suitable to the romance tale. But neither view explains the fascination and power these plays still exert. Originally published in 1987, Ruth Nevo’s book offers a reading of the plays which invokes the findings and methods of post-psychoanalytic semiotics. Drawing on a Lacanian model of the "textual unconscious", she embarks on searching analyses of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, brilliantly illuminating their apparent absurdities and anomalies, their bizarre or preposterous events and obscurely motivated actions, their often puzzling syntax. Her investigation of the plays’ informing fantasies produces unified and enriched readings which serve both to rehabilitate those plays which have been less than highly thought of, and to disclose new significance in the acknowledged masterpieces.
Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan
by Richard HalpernStarting with St. Paul's argument that the Greeks were afflicted with homosexuality to punish their excessive love of statues, Richard Halpern uncovers a tradition in which aesthetic experience gives birth to the sexual—and thus reverses the Freudian thesis that erotic desire is sublimated into art. Rather, Halpern argues, sodomy was implicated with aesthetic categories from the very start, as he traces a connection between sodomy and the unrepresentable that runs from Shakespeare's Sonnets to Oscar Wilde's novella The Portrait of Mr. W.H., Freud's famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, and Jacques Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. Drawing on theology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism, Shakespeare's Perfume explores how the history of aesthetics and the history of sexuality are fundamentally connected.
Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays
by Colin McGinnShakespeare’s plays are usually studied by literary scholars and historians and the books about him from those perspectives are legion. It is most unusual for a trained philosopher to give us his insight, as Colin McGinn does here, into six of Shakespeare’s greatest plays–A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. In his brilliant commentary, McGinn explores Shakespeare’s philosophy of life and illustrates how he was influenced, for example, by the essays of Montaigne that were translated into English while Shakespeare was writing. In addition to chapters on the great plays, there are also essays on Shakespeare and gender and his plays from the aspects of psychology, ethics, and tragedy.As McGinn says about Shakespeare, “There is not a sentimental bone in his body. He has the curiosity of a scientist, the judgment of a philosopher, and the soul of a poet.” McGinn relates the ideas in the plays to the later philosophers such as David Hume and the modern commentaries of critics such as Harold Bloom. The book is an exhilarating reading experience, especially for students who are discovering the greatest writer in English.
Shakespeare's Poetic Styles: Verse into Drama
by John BaxterFirst published in 1980. At their most successful, Shakespeare's styles are strategies to make plain the limits of thought and feeling which define the significance of human actions. John Baxter analyses the way in which these limits are reached, and also provides a strong argument for the idea that the power of Shakespearean drama depends upon the co-operation of poetic style and dramatic form. Three plays are examined in detail in the text: The Tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville and Richard II and Macbeth by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's Poetics: Aristotle and Anglo-Italian Renaissance Genres (Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies)
by Sarah Dewar-WatsonThe startling central idea behind this study is that the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the sixteenth century ultimately had a profound impact on almost every aspect of Shakespeare's late plays”their sources, subject matter and thematic concerns. Shakespeare's Poetics reveals the generic complexity of Shakespeare's late plays to be informed by contemporary debates about the tonal and structural composition of tragicomedy. Author Sarah Dewar-Watson re-examines such plays as The Winter's Tale, Pericles and The Tempest in light of the important work of reception which was undertaken in Italy by pioneering theorists such as Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio (1504-73) and Giambattista Guarini (1538-1612). The author demonstrates ways in which these theoretical developments filtered from their intellectual base in Italy to the playhouses of early modern England via the work of dramatists such as Jonson and Fletcher. Dewar-Watson argues that the effect of this widespread revaluation of genre not only extends as far as Shakespeare, but that he takes a leading role in developing its possibilities on the English stage. In the course of pursuing this topic, Dewar-Watson also engages with several areas of current scholarly debate: the nature of Shakespeare's authorship; recent interest in and work on Shakespeare's later plays; and new critical work on Italian language-learning in Renaissance England. Finally, Shakespeare's Poetics develops current critical thinking about the place of Greek literature in Renaissance England, particularly in relation to Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's Poetics: In relation to King Lear
by Russell A FraserFirst published in 1962. This volume gives as complete an account as possible of the Shakespearian experience, particularly in terms of one play, King Lear, but in general against the context of all of Shakespeare's work and that of the age in which it was created. Chapters cover: King Lear in the Renaissance; Providence; Kind; Fortune; Anarchy and Order; Reason and Will; Show and Substance; Redemption and Shakespeare's Poetics.
Shakespeare’s Politic Histories: The Italian Connection (Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies)
by John H. CameronThis book argues that Shakespeare's first tetralogy is informed by the Italian ‘politic histories’ of the early modern period, those works of history, inspired by the Roman historian Tacitus, that sought to explore the machinations of power politics in governance and in the shaping of historical events; that a close reading of these Italian ‘politic histories’ will greatly aid our understanding of the ‘politic’ qualities dramatized in Shakespeare’s early English History plays; that the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli in particular will likewise aid to such understanding; that these ‘politic histories’ were available (in a variety of forms) to many English early modern writers, Shakespeare included, and are thus helpful as grounds for political and strategic analogy and for informing our reading of Shakespeare's politic histories. While a reading of the Italian ‘politic’ historians can aid in our understanding of Shakespeare’s achievement, we should regard the English History plays as ‘politic histories’ in their own right, i.e. as dramatized versions of precisely the same kinds of ‘politic’ historical writing, with its emphasis on ragion di Stato or raison d’état. This emphasis on what the Elizabethans called ‘stratagems’ suggests new ways to read the plays and to interpret the motivation and action of its characters, ways that challenge some of our more established reading of the plays’ ‘Machiavellian’ characters (particularly Richard III) and suggest far greater strategic acumen on the part of previously overlooked characters (particularly Buckingham and Stanley), providing new ways to read the Shakespeare's politic histories and to better appreciate their Italian connection.
Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom
by Timothy W. BurnsWinner of 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award, Shakespeare's Political Wisdom offers careful interpretations of five Shakespearean plays –Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and The Tempest–with a view to the enduring guidance those plays can provide to human, political life. The plays have been chosen for their relentless attention to the questions that, for Shakespeare, form the heart and soul of politics: Who should rule, and what is justice? Burns provides an original reading of the plays through the lens of political philosophy rather than Theatre or Renaissance Studies. Shakespeare's wisdom found in these five plays, Burns concludes, provides a deeply relevant critique of our contemporary civic culture.
Shakespeare's Politics
by Allan Bloom Harry V. JaffaTaking the classical view that the political shapes man's consciousness, Allan Bloom considers Shakespeare as a profoundly political Renaissance dramatist. He aims to recover Shakespeare's ideas and beliefs and to make his work once again a recognized source for the serious study of moral and political problems. In essays looking at Julius Caesar, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Bloom shows how Shakespeare presents a picture of man that does not assume privileged access for only literary criticism. With this claim, he argues that political philosophy offers a comprehensive framework within which the problems of the Shakespearean heroes can be viewed. In short, he argues that Shakespeare was an eminently political author. Also included is an essay by Harry V. Jaffa on the limits of politics in King Lear.
Shakespeare's Possible Worlds
by Simon PalfreyNew methods are needed to do justice to Shakespeare. His work exceeds conventional models, past and present, for understanding playworlds. In this book, Simon Palfrey goes right to the heart of early modern popular drama, revealing both how it works and why it matters. Unlike his contemporaries, Shakespeare gives independent life to all his instruments, and to every fraction and fragment of the plays. Palfrey terms these particles 'formactions' - theatre-specific forms that move with their own action and passion. Palfrey's book is critically daring in both substance and format. Its unique mix of imaginative gusto, thought experiments, and virtuosic technique generates piercing close readings of the plays. There is far more to playlife than meets the eye. Influenced by Leibniz's visionary original model of possible worlds, Palfrey opens up the multiple worlds of Shakespeare's language, scenes, and characters as never before.
Shakespeare's Problem Plays
by William ShakespeareA collection containing Alls Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and The History of Troilus and Cressida
Shakespeare’s Props: Memory and Cognition (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Sophie DuncanCognitive approaches to drama have enriched our understanding of Early Modern playtexts, acting and spectatorship. This monograph is the first full-length study of Shakespeare’s props and their cognitive impact. Shakespeare’s most iconic props have become transhistorical, transnational metonyms for their plays: a strawberry-spotted handkerchief instantly recalls Othello; a skull Hamlet. One reason for stage properties’ neglect by cognitive theorists may be the longstanding tendency to conceptualise props as detachable body parts: instead, this monograph argues for props as detachable parts of the mind. Through props, Shakespeare’s characters offload, reveal and intervene in each other’s cognition, illuminating and extending their affect. Shakespeare’s props are neither static icons nor substitutes for the body, but volatile, malleable, and dangerously exposed extensions of his characters’ minds. Recognising them as such offers new readings of the plays, from the way memory becomes a weapon in Hamlet’s Elsinore, to the pleasures and perils of Early Modern gift culture in Othello. The monograph illuminates Shakespeare’s exploration of extended cognition, recollection and remembrance at a time when the growth of printing was forcing Renaissance culture to rethink the relationship between memory and the object. Readings in Shakespearean stage history reveal how props both carry audience affect and reveal cultural priorities: some accrue cultural memories, while others decay and are forgotten as detritus of the stage.
Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index
by R. W. DentThis 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 1981.
Shakespeare's Reading Audiences: Early Modern Books and Audience Interpretation
by Cyndia Susan CleggThis study grows out of the intersection of two realms of scholarly investigation - the emerging public sphere in early modern England and the history of the book. <P><P>Shakespeare's Reading Audiences examines the ways in which different communities - humanist, legal, religious and political - would have interpreted Shakespeare's plays and poems, whether printed or performed. <P>Cyndia Susan Clegg begins by analysing elite reading clusters associated with the Court, the universities, and the Inns of Court and how their interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Henry V arose from their reading of Italian humanists. <P><P>She concludes by examining how widely held public knowledge about English history both affected Richard II's reception and how such knowledge was appropriated by the State. <P>She also considers The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Othello from the point of view of audience members conversant in popular English legal writing and Macbeth from the perspective of popular English Calvinism.