Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature

Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature
Author: David M. Bevington
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1978
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780874131291

This collection of essays represents, in the view of the editors, the best critical work represented at the World Shakespeare Congress in 1976. The work of leading Shakespeareans is represented, along with the work of several younger scholars and critics on a wide variety of subjects.

Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (Routledge Revivals)

Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Michael D. Bristol
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2014-03-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131774828X

First published in 1990, this title explores the nature of the interaction between Shakespeare and American culture. Shakespeare stands at the center of an elaborate institutional reality, closely tied to both cultural and ideological production. His plays, Michael Bristol asserts, help to constitute a primary affirmative theme of much American culture criticism, specifically the celebration of individuality and the values of expressive autonomy. This reissue will be of particular value to Literature students and researchers with an interest in Shakespeare, as well as those interested in American cultural history more generally.

Shakespeare at Work

Shakespeare at Work
Author: John Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1999
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780198186885

Why did Shakespeare revise his plays? In a brilliant and pioneering analysis, the distinguished critic John Jones explores the critical and dramatic significance of Shakespeare's revisions. Analyzing such plays as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida, he reveals the artistic impact of the revisions and their importance for our understanding of each play's moral and metaphysical foundations.

Shakespeare's King Lear

Shakespeare's King Lear
Author: S. Nagarajan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2017-05-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1443893455

Shakespeare’s King Lear is often called his mightiest play. This comprehensive edition by S. Nagarajan (who edited the evergreen Signet edition of Measure for Measure) presents a lifetime of scholarship on Shakespeare and fifteen years of research specifically on Lear. Accessibly written, this edition serves the reader who has access to well-stocked libraries and lively theatres, as well as the student whose resources are more limited. The play-text is a conflation of the Quarto text and the First Folio text, and the notes provide a generous but discreet selection of alternative readings of lines and contexts. In ten erudite essays, Nagarajan provides a thoroughly researched picture of Shakespeare’s sources for the play, his unique use of language, Elizabethan theatre, history and values of the play, analysis of enigmatic scenes, glimpses into its performance history and other subjects, with special attention to Indian dramatic art theory. This edition is the first to bring together both the best scholarship on Lear to date and perspectives from Indian poetics and philosophy. The result is a text that robustly includes, but goes beyond, Anglophone cultures and Euro-American experiences, making it truly representative of Lear’s global stage.

Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender

Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender
Author: Kate Chedgzoy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2000-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350310263

Over the last quarter-century, feminist criticism of Shakespeare has greatly expanded and enriched the range of interpretations of the Shakespearean texts, their original historical location, and subsequent reinterpretation. Characteristically it weaves between past and present, driven by a commitment both to intervene in contemporary cultural politics and to recover a fuller sense of the sexual politics of the literary heritage. Collecting together essays which offer detailed accounts of particular plays with others that take a broader overview of the field, this Casebook showcases the range of critical strategies used by feminist criticism, and illustrates how vital attention to the politics of gender and sexuality is to a full understanding and appreciation of Shakespearean drama.

Routledge Revivals: Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism (1991)

Routledge Revivals: Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism (1991)
Author: Philip C Kolin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2017-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351984039

First published in 1991, this book is the first annotated bibliography of feminist Shakespeare criticism from 1975 to 1988 — a period that saw a remarkable amount of ground-breaking work. While the primary focus is on feminist studies of Shakespeare, it also includes wide-ranging works on language, desire, role-playing, theatre conventions, marriage, and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture — shedding light on Shakespeare’s views on and representation of women, sex and gender. Accompanying the 439 entries are extensive, informative annotations that strive to maintain the original author’s perspective, supplying a careful and thorough account of the main points of an article.

Shakespeare on Masculinity

Shakespeare on Masculinity
Author: Robin Headlam Wells
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2000-12-21
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0521662044

Reviews Shakespeare's view of masculinity through The Tempest, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and others.

Shakespearean Tragedy

Shakespearean Tragedy
Author: John Drakakis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2014-06-06
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1317899903

Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.

Shakespeare and Feminist Theory

Shakespeare and Feminist Theory
Author: Marianne Novy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472567080

Are Shakespeare's plays dramatizations of patriarchy or representations of assertive and eloquent women? Or are they sometimes both? And is it relevant, and if so how, that his women were first played by boys? This book shows how many kinds of feminist theory help analyze the dynamics of Shakespeare's plays. Both feminist theory and the plays deal with issues such as likeness and difference between the sexes, the complexity of relationships between women, the liberating possibilities of desire, what marriage means and how much women can remake it, how women can use and expand their culture's ideas of motherhood and of women's work, and how women can have power through language. This lively exploration of these and related issues is an ideal introduction to the field of feminist readings of Shakespeare.

Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double

Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double
Author: Kent Cartwright
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1991-08-05
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0271073373

Why does Shakespearean tragedy continue to move spectators even though Elizabethan philosophical assumptions have faded from belief? Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double seeks answers in the moment-by-moment dynamics of performance and response, and the Shakespearean text signals those possibilities. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double investigates the poetics of audience response. Approaching tragedy through the rhythms of spectatorial engagement and detachment ("aesthetic distance"), Kent Cartwright provides a performance-oriented and phenomenological perspective. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double analyzes the development of the tragic audience as it oscillates between engagement—an immersion in narrative, character, and physical action—and detachment—a consciousness of its own comparative judgments, its doubts, and of acting and theatricality. Cartwright contends that the spectator emerges as a character implied and acted upon by the play. He supports his theory with close readings of individual plays from the perspective of a particular element of spectatorial response: the carnivalesque qualities of Romeo and Juliet; the rhythm of similitude, displacement, and wonder in the audience's relationships to Hamlet; aesthetic distance as scenic structure in Othello; the influence of secondary characters and ensemble acting on the Quarto King Lear; and spectatorship as action itself in Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double treats the dramatic moment in Shakespearean tragedy as uncommonly charged, various, indeterminate, always negotiating unpredictably between the necessary and the spontaneous. Cartwright argues that, for the audience, the very dynamism of tragedy confers a certain enfranchisement, and the spectator's experience emerges as analogous to, though different from, that of the protagonist. Through its own engagement and detachments the audience becomes the final performer creating the play's meaning.