Imagining Cleopatra

Imagining Cleopatra
Author: Yasmin Arshad
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2019-08-22
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 135005898X

Shakespeare's characterization of Cleopatra may dominate the collective consciousness, but he was only one of several 16th-century writers fascinated by the enigmatic queen of Egypt. Early modern conceptions of Cleopatra offer a rich, complex, and variable set of models for understanding the period's responses to race, female sovereignty, and classical antiquity. This interdisciplinary study investigates images of Cleopatra in the early modern period and examines how her story was mediated and used – from drawing lessons from history to being a symbol of female heroism. It draws on early historiographical works, political and philosophical treatises, coterie dramatic productions, and gender, race and performance studies, as well as evidence from material culture, to consider what was known and thought about Cleopatra in the period This book provides a new literary and cultural history of one of the world's most contested and politically-charged iconic female figures. It combines a close reading of literary and dramatic works with historical and political contexts, paying particular attention to the three major early modern Cleopatra plays: Mary Sidney's translation of Robert Garnier's Marc Antoine, Samuel Daniel's The Tragedie of Cleopatra, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. By examining these conflicting historical and fictional identities, Yasmin Arshad offers a diverse and ground-breaking study of Cleopatra's 'infinite variety'.

Literary Transvaluation

Literary Transvaluation
Author: Barbara Jane Bono
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520335651

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 1984.

A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume I

A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume I
Author: Richard Dutton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0470997273

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare’s plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare’s tragedies contains original essays on every tragedy from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus as well as thirteen additional essays on such topics as Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies, Shakespeare’s tragedies on film, Shakespeare’s tragedies of love, Hamlet in performance, and tragic emotion in Shakespeare.

Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra

Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra
Author: Ana Maribel Moreno G.
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1491765992

In 1616, William Shakespeare shuffled loose the mortal coil. In honor of his death four centuries ago, Ana Maribel de Moncada, Panamanian, professor of English at Panamas Universidad Especializada de la Amricas (UDELAS) created Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra: Tragic Women in Shakespeares Plays, a literary analysis of three of Shakespeares most compelling, complicated, and cherished characters. Using information and insight gleaned from the works of her peers and other Shakespearean experts, Ana Maribels scholarly analysis of the importance of these three women as characters drew heavily upon the foundational works in which they appeared. The stories of Desdemona, the doomed wife of Othello; Lady Macbeth, the scheming queen from Macbeth; and Cleopatra, the all-powerful but ultimately tragic queen caught between love, rivalry, and ambition in Antony and Cleopatra are well documented through movies, novels, plays, operas, television, songs, and more. To entice students and educators alike, Ana Maribel designed her work to inspire both scholarly and casual reflection, analysis, and discussion of the works of the most well-known and respected English-language playwright. From the richness of the original plays, the author harvested the extensive detail and profound imagery found in Shakespearean text. To best honor Shakespeare four hundred years after his death, Ana Maribel sought to inspire a global celebration and discussion of his work and its impact on language, theatre, and literature in all segments of human society.

Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Reader

Antony and Cleopatra: A Critical Reader
Author: Domenico Lovascio
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2019-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350049913

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: - Essays on the play's critical and performance history - A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play - A selection of new essays by leading scholars - A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online Antony and Cleopatra is among Shakespeare's most enduringly popular tragedies. A theatrical piece of extraordinary political power, it also features one of his most memorable couples. Both intellectually and emotionally challenging, Antony and Cleopatra also tests the boundaries of theatrical representation. This volume offers a stimulating and accessible guide to the play that takes stock of the past and current situation of scholarship while simultaneously opening up fresh, thought-provoking critical perspectives.

Foreign and Native on the English Stage, 1588-1611

Foreign and Native on the English Stage, 1588-1611
Author: Jane Pettegree
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2011-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230307795

This original and scholarly work uses three detailed case studies of plays – Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra , King Lear and Cymbeline – to cast light on the ways in which early modern writers used metaphor to explore how identities emerge from the interaction of competing regional and spiritual topographies.

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance
Author: Katarzyna Lecky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-04-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192571753

Katarzyna Lecky explores how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. She explores chapbooks ('cheapbooks') by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton alongside the portable cartography circulating in the same retail print industry. Domestic pocket maps were designed for heavy use by a broad readership that included those on the fringes of literacy. The era's de facto laureates all banked their success as writers appealing to this burgeoning market share by drawing the nation as the property of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This book investigates the accessible world of small-format cartography as it emerges in the texts of the poets raised in the expansive public sphere in which pocket maps flourished. It works at the intersections of space, place, and national identity to reveal the geographical imaginary shaping the flourishing business of cheap print. Its placement of poetic economies within mainstream systems of trade also demonstrates how cartography and poetry worked together to mobilize average consumers as political agents. This everyday form of geographic poiesis was also a strong platform for poets writing for monarchs and magistrates when their visions of the nation ran counter to the interests of the government.