The Penguin Companion to Classical Music

The Penguin Companion to Classical Music
Author: Paul Griffiths
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 1412
Release: 2004-10-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0141909765

This superbly authoratitive new work provides a comprehensive A-Z guide to some 1000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a vast range of composers, as well as looking at such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Throught Griffiths skilfully blends lightly worn scholarship with personal insight, whether examining the emotional colouring that different musical keys achieve or charting the rise and development of the symphony.

Shakespeare's Late Plays

Shakespeare's Late Plays
Author: Nicholas Potter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2009-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137019093

Shakespeare's late plays are a 'mixed bag' with a common theme: from the fiendishly jealous Leontes to the saintly Pericles; from the ineffectual Cymbeline to the omnipotent Propspero; from the 'sprites and goblins' of The Tempest to the famous bear of The Winter's Tale, the characters have excited wonder and contempt while the range of incident is almost irresponsibly extravagant. Was Shakespeare losing his grip, or his interest, or both? Was he striking out in some bold new theatrical direction? This Guide provides a critical survey of the major debates and issues surrounding the late plays, from the earliest published accounts to the present day. Nicholas Potter offers a clear guiding narrative and an exploration of literary history, focusing on how criticism of these remarkable works, and attempts to make sense of them, have developed over the years.

Shakespeare's Literary Authorship

Shakespeare's Literary Authorship
Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2008-06-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521881668

This book considers Shakespeare as a literary figure, analysing his full professional career, both poetry and plays.

Revisiting The Tempest

Revisiting The Tempest
Author: Silvia Bigliazzi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2014-02-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137333146

Revisiting The Tempest offers a lively reconsideration of how The Tempest encourages interpretation and creative appropriation. It includes a wide range of essays on theoretical and practical criticism focusing on the play's original dramatic context, on its signifying processes and its present-time screen remediation.

Shakespeare's Demonology

Shakespeare's Demonology
Author: Marion Gibson
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2014-02-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472500318

This volume in the long-running and acclaimed Shakespeare Dictionary series is a detailed, critical reference work examining all aspects of magic, good and evil, across Shakespeare's works. Topics covered include the representation of fairies, witches, ghosts, devils and spirits.

Shakespeare's Late Plays

Shakespeare's Late Plays
Author: Nick Potter
Publisher: Red Globe Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2009-07-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

An essential critical survey of the major debates and issues surrounding Shakespeare's late plays, from the earliest published accounts to the present day.

Shakespeare Beyond the Green World

Shakespeare Beyond the Green World
Author: Todd Andrew Borlik
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-01-19
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 019286663X

Unpicking the ecopolitics of Shakespeare's plays at the Stuart court, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World establishes that the playwright was remarkably attentive to the environmental issues of his era. As a court dramatist, he designed his plays to captivate a patron deeply involved in both the conservation and exploitation of a burgeoning empire's natural resources. Spurred by James' campaign to unify his kingdoms, the Jacobean Shakespeare ventures beyond the green and pleasant lowlands of England to chart the wild topographies of an expansionist Great Britain: the blasted heath in Macbeth, the caves and mines of Timon of Athens, the overfished North Sea in Pericles, the Welsh mountains in Cymbeline, the Arctic fur country in The Winter's Tale, the fens in The Tempest, overcrowded London and empty Ulster in Measure for Measure and Coriolanus, and the night in Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear. While these plays often simulate a monarch's-eye-view of the natural world, t reveal that Crown policies were fiercely contested from below. In addition to trekking beyond verdant landscapes, Shakespeare Beyond the Green World seeks to mitigate the Anglocentric and anthropocentric bias of the archive by putting the plays into conversation with texts in which the subaltern wild growls back. Combining deep dives into environmental history with close readings of Shakespearean wordplay, original typography, and original performance conditions, this study re-wilds the Renaissance stage. It spotlights Shakespeare's tendency to humanize beasts and bestialize allegedly godlike monarchs, debunking fantasies of human exceptionalism. By clarifying how the Jacobean plays expose monarchical dominion as ecological tyranny, this study remains scrupulously historicist while reasserting Shakespearean drama's scorching relevance in the Anthropocene.

Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy

Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy
Author: Joseph Allen Bryant
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1986
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780813130958

In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse. Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early a.

The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus

The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2024-04-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

"The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus" by William Shakespeare is a gripping and intense drama that explores themes of revenge, betrayal, and the destructive consequences of violence. Set in ancient Rome, the play follows the tragic downfall of the noble general Titus Andronicus and his family as they become embroiled in a cycle of vengeance and bloodshed. At the heart of the story is the brutal conflict between Titus Andronicus and Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose sons are executed by Titus as retribution for their crimes. In retaliation, Tamora and her lover, Aaron the Moor, orchestrate a series of heinous acts of revenge against Titus and his family, plunging them into a spiral of madness and despair. As the body count rises and the atrocities escalate, Titus is consumed by grief and rage, leading to a climactic showdown that culminates in a shocking and tragic conclusion. Along the way, Shakespeare explores themes of honor, justice, and the nature of humanity, offering a searing indictment of the cycle of violence and the capacity for cruelty that lies within us all.