Download or read book Faith in Shakespeare written by Richard C. McCoy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speculation about Shakespeare's own religious beliefs and responses to the Reformation have dominated discussions of faith in the playwright's work for decades. As a result, we often lose sight of what's truly important-the plays themselves. By focusing on those plays in several succinct, fluently written chapters, Richard McCoy reminds us of the spell-binding power inherent in works like Othello, As You Like It, and The Winter's Tale and shows why they continue to cause audiences to gladly exercise what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief." Faith in Shakespeare ruminates on what it means to believe in the Bard's plays, exploring how their plots can be both preposterous and gripping, and how their characters seem more substantial and enduring than the people surrounding us in the theater. Informed by Coleridge's "poetic faith," the book discusses what this concept shares with religious faith and how it departs from recent historicist approaches to the dramatist's work. Faith in Shakespeare concentrates more on text than context, finding the afterlife of Shakespeare's language more vivid and engaging than theological controversies. The book confirms its convictions in literature's intrinsic powers by exploring the causes for our paradoxical belief in theater's potent but manifest illusions. Plays that ask their audience to "awake your faith" or "believe then, if you please" ultimately enable us to "mind true things by what their mockeries be." Rather than faith in God or the supernatural, McCoy argues that faith in Shakespeare is sustained and explained only by the complex, subtle, and entirely human power of poetic eloquence and dramatic performance.
Download or read book The Faith of William Shakespeare written by Graham Holderness and published by Lion Books. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Shakespeare stills stands head and shoulders above any other author in the English language, a position that is unlikely ever to change. Yet it is often said that we know very little about him - and that applies as much to what he believed as it does to the rest of his biography. Or does it? In this authoritative new study, Graham Holderness takes us through the context of Shakespeare's life, times of religious and political turmoil, and looks at what we do know of Shakespeare the Anglican. But then he goes beyond that, and mines the plays themselves, not just for the words of the characters, but for the concepts, themes and language which Shakespeare was himself steeped in - the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Considering particularly such plays as Richard ll, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, Holderness shows how the ideas of Catholicism come up against those of Luther and Calvin; how Christianity was woven deep into Shakespeare's psyche, and how he brought it again and again to his art.
Download or read book Religion Around Shakespeare written by Peter Iver Kaufman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.
Download or read book A Will to Believe written by David Scott Kastan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 19 December 1601, John Croke, then Speaker of the House of Commons, addressed his colleagues: "If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion." But if religion was recognized as the "chief thing in a Commonwealth," we have been less certain what it does in Shakespeare's plays. Written and performed in a culture in which religion was indeed inescapable, the plays have usually been seen either as evidence of Shakespeare's own disinterested secularism or, more recently, as coded signposts to his own sectarian commitments. Based upon the inaugural series of the Oxford-Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2008, A Will to Believe offers a thoughtful, surprising, and often moving consideration of how religion actually functions in them: not as keys to Shakespeare's own faith but as remarkably sensitive registers of the various ways in which religion charged the world in which he lived. The book shows what we know and can't know about Shakespeare's own beliefs, and demonstrates, in a series of wonderfully alert and agile readings, how the often fraught and vertiginous religious environment of Post-Reformation England gets refracted by the lens of Shakespeare's imagination.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion written by Hannibal Hamlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging yet accessible investigation into the importance of religion in Shakespeare's works, from a team of eminent international scholars.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Hybrid Faith written by J. Mayer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-08-04 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book throws new light on the issue of the dramatist's religious orientation by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars. It is argued that faith was a quest rather than a quiet certainty for the playwright.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England written by Dennis Taylor and published by Studies in Religion and Litera. This book was released on 2003 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of Shakespeare's Catholic contexts has occupied many scholars in recent years and this study brings together 16 original essays examining Shakespeare's work in the light of revisionist scholarship, from monastic life in 'Measure for Measure' to Puritanism in 'Hamlet'.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Religious Background written by Peter Milward and published by Loyola Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Christian Humanism in Shakespeare written by Lee Oser and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian grounds. Stressing Shakespeare’s theological sensitivity, Oser places Shakespeare’s work in the “radical middle,” the dialectical opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of art intended for a catholic (small “c”) audience. It describes the conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his literary purposes. Oser reviews the rival cases for a Protestant Shakespeare and for a Catholic Shakespeare, but leaves the issue open, focusing, instead, on how Shakespeare exploits artistic resources that are specific to Christianity, including the classical-Christian rhetorical tradition. The scope of the book ranges from an introductory survey of the critical field as it now stands, to individual chapters on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, Hamlet, and King Lear. Writing with a deep sense of literary history, Oser holds that mainstream literary criticism has created a false picture of Shakespeare by secularizing him and misconstruing the nature of his art. Through careful study of the plays, Oser recovers a Shakespeare who is less vulnerable to the winds of academic and political fashion, and who is a friend to the enduring project of humanistic education. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare: A Study in Religion and Literature is both eminently readable and a work of consequence.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion written by David Loewenstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history.
Download or read book Brightest Heaven of Invention written by Peter J. Leithart and published by Canon Press & Book Service. This book was released on 1996 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare was, as Caesar says of Cassius, "a great observer," able to see and depict patterns of events and character. He understood how politics is shaped by the clash of men with various colorings of self-interest and idealism, how violence breeds violence, how fragile human beings create masks and disguises for protection, how schemers do the same for advancement, how love can grow out of hate and hate out of love. Dare anyone say that these insights are irrelevant to living in the real world? For many in an older generation, the Bible and the Collected Shakespeare were the two indispensable books, and thus their sense of life and history was shaped by the best and best-told stories. And they were the wiser for it. Literature abstracts from the complex events of life (just as we all do in everyday life) and can reveal patterns that are like the patterns of events in the real world. Studying literature can give us sensitivity to those patterns. This sensitivity to the rhythm of life is closely connected with what the Bible calls wisdom.
Download or read book Theatre and Religion written by Richard Dutton and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Believing in Shakespeare written by Claire McEachern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A discussion of the connections between believing in Shakespeare's play and a post-Reformation understanding of salvation.
Download or read book Will in the World How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Anniversary Edition written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-05-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Abraham written by Ken Jackson and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespeare and Abraham, Ken Jackson illuminates William Shakespeare’s dramatic fascination with the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Themes of child killing fill Shakespeare’s early plays: Genesis 22 informed Clifford’s attack on young Rutland in 3 Henry 6, Hubert’s providentially thwarted murder of Arthur in King John, and Aaron the Moor’s surprising decision to spare his son amidst the filial slaughters of Titus Andronicus, among others. However, the playwright’s full engagement with the biblical narrative does not manifest itself exclusively in scenes involving the sacrifice of children or in verbal borrowings from the famously sparse story of Abraham. Jackson argues that the most important influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is to be found in the conceptual framework that Shakespeare develops to explore relationships among ideas of religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. Jackson probes the Shakespearean texts from the vantage of modern theology and critical theory, while also orienting them toward the traditions concerning Abraham in Jewish, Pauline, patristic, medieval, and Reformation sources and early English drama. Consequently, the playwright’s “Abrahamic explorations” become strikingly apparent in unexpected places such as the “trial” of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the bifurcated structure of Timon of Athens. By situating Shakespeare in a complex genealogy that extends from ancient religion to postmodern philosophy, Jackson inserts Shakespeare into the larger contemporary conversation about religion in the modern world.
Download or read book Trope and Allegory written by Francis Fergusson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At odds with the view that Shakespeare was a religious skeptic who only paid lip service to religious beliefs to pacify his less perceptive audience, Francis Fergusson investigates a relationship between Shakespeare and Dante, whom he sees as writing out of the same classical Christian heritage. Fergusson explores analogous themes from several Shakespearean plays and parts of Dante's Divine Comedy. These themes are romantic love and faith in it; treachery and its recognition; a commonsense view of secular government and a belief in the necessity of right rule for right government; and poetry as evidence of things not seen and its relation to religious belief.
Download or read book A Christian Guide to the Classics written by Leland Ryken and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people are familiar with the classics of Western literature, but few have actually read them. Written to equip readers for a lifetime of learning, this beginner’s guide to reading the classics by renowned literary scholar Leland Ryken answers basic questions readers often have, including “Why read the classics?” and “How do I read a classic?” Offering a list of some of the best works from the last 2,000 years and time-tested tips for effectively engaging with them, this companion to Ryken’s Christian Guides to the Classics series will give readers the tools they need to read, interact with, and enjoy some of history’s greatest literature.
