The Masks of Anthony and Cleopatra

The Masks of Anthony and Cleopatra
Author: Marvin Rosenberg
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2006
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780874139242

"In his analysis, Marvin Rosenberg sets out to steer a path between the "extremes" of Rome and Egypt and all they stand for: and to explore the relentless "to and back" confrontation of their different sets of values which leads ultimately to destruction."

Creating Communities

Creating Communities
Author: Nourit Melcer-Padon
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3732841863

How does historical reality interrelate with fiction? And how much are readers themselves involved in the workings of fictional literature? With innovative interpretations of various well-known texts, Nourit Melcer-Padon introduces the use of literary masks and illustrates literature's engagement of its readers' ethical judgement. She promotes a new perception of literary theory and of connections between thinkers such as Iser, Castoriadis, Sartre, Jung and Neumann. The book offers a unique view on the role of the community in post-existentialist modern cultural reality by emphasizing the importance of ritual practices in literature as a cultural manifestation.

Royal Power and Authority in Shakespeare’s Late Tragedies

Royal Power and Authority in Shakespeare’s Late Tragedies
Author: Alisa Manninen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1443884383

William Shakespeare explores political survival as a question of interaction at court in King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Through a discussion of authority as an element that is distinct from power, this book offers a new perspective on the importance of acts of persuasion and the contribution the late tragedies make to Shakespeare’s portrayal of monarchy. It argues that the most productive uses of the material power to judge or reward are those that reinforce royal authority and establish the monarch at the centre of the web of noble relationships. In the late tragedies, rulership is exercised at court. It acquires a nature of its own as the interaction of powerful and potentially powerful individuals among the nobility. The persuasive exercise of authority complements the tangible power that is founded on the monarch’s material resources, so that consent to the monarch’s supremacy is obtained through various discourses of justification and the performance of the monarch’s social role. Shakespeare’s combination of emotional intimacy with political concerns becomes central to the tragedies of these three plays when the failure to establish control over power and authority leads to the breakdown of established values and political traditions.

Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia

Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia
Author: Yuichi Tsukada
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350067245

In 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James I inherited the English throne. During James's reign, England continued to hark back to Elizabeth, comparing him with his predecessor – not always in a way that was either flattering or pleasing to James. Critics have traditionally assumed that Shakespeare avoided involving himself in this discourse. In this study of Shakespeare's Jacobean plays, however, Yuichi Tsukada demonstrates that, far from not involving himself in the phenomenon of nostalgia for Elizabeth, Shakespeare interacted closely with retrospective writings on Elizabeth and illuminated the complex politics behind the nostalgia. Based upon close readings of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, together with a range of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson, the book traces the ongoing cultural negotiation of the memory of Elizabeth. Yuichi Tsukada offers fresh insights into enigmatic aspects of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama. For instance, what was the original significance of the two contentious prophecies – 'none of woman born' and the march of Birnam Wood – in Macbeth? Or that of the seemingly out-of-place triumphal procession of Volumnia near the tragic end of Coriolanus? Although her memory recurred in all forms of discourse throughout the first decade of James's reign, the impact of this cultural undercurrent on Shakespeare's Jacobean drama has been ignored or underestimated. Shakespeare and the Politics of Nostalgia reveals the unnoticed richness of Shakespeare's Jacobean drama by focusing on the growing cultural and political nostalgia for England's dead queen.

Antony and Cleopatra

Antony and Cleopatra
Author: Sara M. Deats
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2005
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 113588790X

This collection of twenty original essays will expand the critical contexts in which Antony and Cleopatra can be enjoyed as both literature and theater.

Encyclopedia of Mythological Objects

Encyclopedia of Mythological Objects
Author: Theresa Bane
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1476676887

Curious about the chains that bound Fenriswulf in Norse mythology? Or the hut of Baba Yaga, the infamous witch of Russian folklore? Containing more than one thousand detailed entries on the magical and mythical items from the different folklore, legends, and religions the world over, this encyclopedia is the first of its kind. From Abadi, the named stone in Roman mythology to Zul-Hajam, one of the four swords said to belong to the prophet Mohammed, each item is described in as much detail as the original source material provided, including information on its origin, who was its wielder, and the extent of its magical abilities. The text also includes a comprehensive cross-reference system and an extensive bibliography to aid researchers.

The Masks of Keats

The Masks of Keats
Author: Thomas McFarland
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2000
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780198186458

This book surveys the poetic endeavour of John Keats and urges that his true poetry is uniquely constituted by being uttered through three artificial masks, rather than through the natural voice of his quotidian self. The first mask is formed by the attitudes and reality that ensue from aconscious commitment to the identity of poet as such. The second, called here the Mask of Camelot, takes shape from Keats's acceptance and compelling use of the vogue for medieval imaginings that was sweeping across Europe in his time. The third, the Mask of Hellas, eventuated from Keats'senthusiastic immersion in the rising tide of Romantic Hellenism. Keats's great achievement, the book argues, can only be ascertained by means of a resuscitation of the defunct critical category of 'genius', as that informs his use of the masks. To validate this category, the volume is concernedthroughout with the necessity of discriminating the truly poetic from the meretricious in Keats's endeavour. The Masks of Keats thus constitutes a criticism of and a rebuke to the deconstructive approach, which must treat all texts as equal and must entirely forego the conception of quality.

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame
Author: Robert A Logan
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2018-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1580443206

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, and the Nature of Fame is a characterological study offering new perspectives on Antony and Cleopatra, the most ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays. It also offers new insights about the origins and nature of Shakespeare's imperishable fame. Wide-ranging in its concerns, this monograph promises to make an essential difference in the way scholars view characterizations, fame, Shakespeare's reputation, and the eminence of the celebrated figures of the play.

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
Author: William F. Zak
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2015-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 149851037X

This revaluation of Shakespeare’s most seductive tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, allies itself with neither George Bernard Shaw and Philo’s Roman judgment of the lovers as “strumpet and fool”—premised on the idle sensuality and feckless self-regard ever evident in the regal pair—nor with the many at the opposite critical pole who have found themselves swept up, to some extent at least, in the “grand illusion” of the lovers themselves as peerless figures transcending the very deaths to which Caesar’s heartless predation drives them. Nor does it seek some middle way, settling into a comfortable agnosticism that claims the poet’s view of the pair remains too ambiguous to resolve. Instead, by mining a wealth of metaphoric cross-references and ironical, mirroring figurations provided by the tragedy’s subsidiary characterizations, this new analysis argues that Shakespeare’s assessment of the lovers is in fact unambiguous: Antony and Cleopatra unknowingly settle for functioning merely as two more of the play’s eunuchs fanning the flames of their self-destructive passions for one another when they could have realized the new heaven and new earth Antony promised his queen had their “intercourse” with one another been more vigorously complete. Not alone their deaths, but their entire experience is this play is but a search for “easy ways to die” rather than the quest is should have been to live more richly yet and generate new life beyond their respective notorieties as separate individuals to be celebrated.

Genesis of the Shakespearean Works

Genesis of the Shakespearean Works
Author: Peter D Matthews
Publisher: Bassano Publishing House
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2017-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0992461618

This book is the result of fourteen years research scrutinizing thousands of historical documents. Dr Matthews reveals never before seen facts regarding the earliest quartos and the first folio – even new research into the leather cover of the Bodleian first folio and how that particular copy came into the possession of the Turbutt family. Dr Matthews has forensically dated the majority of the Shakespearean plays twenty years before earlier scholars, such as Rowe, Malone and Chambers – some plays dated as early as 1561, 1559 and 1558 – up to six years before William Shakespeare was born. Dr Matthews’ exemplary philosophical dissertation of the Shakespearean works and its critics, reveals much about the identity of the real authors. A unique reference work essential to Shakespearean scholars and students alike – this crucial work redates the Shakespearean works, scrutinizes each candidate, and definitively answers the authorship debate.