Download or read book Heterodox Shakespeare written by Sean Benson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last quarter century has seen a “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies as well as competing assertions by secular critics that Shakespeare’s plays reflect profound skepticism and even dismissal of the truth claims of revealed religion. This divide, though real, obscures the fact that Shakespeare often embeds both readings within the same play. This book is the first to propose an accommodation between religious and secular readings of the plays. Benson argues that Shakespeare was neither a mere debunker of religious orthodoxies nor their unquestioning champion. Religious inquiry in his plays is capacious enough to explore religious orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, everything from radical belief and the need to tolerate religious dissent to the possibility of God’s nonexistence. Shakespeare’s willingness to explore all aspects of religious and secular life, often simultaneously, is a mark of his tremendous intellectual range. Taking the heterodox as his focus, Benson examines five figures and ideas on the margins of the post-Reformation English church: nonconforming puritans such as Malvolio as well as physical revenants—the walking dead—whom Shakespeare alludes to and features so tantalizingly in Hamlet. Benson applies what Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability”—his ability to treat both sides of an issue equally and without prejudice—to show that Shakespeare considers possible worlds where God is intimately involved in the lives of persons and, in the very same play, a world in which God may not even exist. Benson demonstrates both that the range of Shakespeare’s investigation of religious questions is more daring than has previously been thought, and that the distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the orthodox and the unorthodox, is one that Shakespeare continually engages.

Download or read book Shakespeare Space written by Isabel Karremann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare / Space explores new approaches to the enactment of 'space' in and through Shakespeare's plays, as well as to the material, cognitive and virtual spaces in which they are enacted. With contributions from 14 leading and emergent experts in their fields, the collection forges innovative connections between spatial studies and cultural geography, cognitive studies, memory studies, phenomenology and the history of the emotions, gender and race studies, rhetoric and language, translation studies, theatre history and performance studies. Each chapter offers methodological reflections on intersections such as space/mobility, space/emotion, space/supernatural, space/language, space/race and space/digital, whose critical purchase is demonstrated in close readings of plays like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, Othello and Shakespeare's history plays. They testify to the importance of space for our understanding of Shakespeare's creative and theatrical practice, and at the same time enlarge our understanding of space as a critical concept in the humanities. It will prove useful to students, scholars, teachers and theatre practitioners of Shakespeare and early modern studies.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation written by Dennis Taylor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference explores how Shakespeare’s plays dramatize key issues of the Elizabethan Reformation, the conflict between the sacred, the critical, and the disenchanted; alternatively, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the secular. Each play imagines their reconciliation or the failure of reconcilation. The Catholic sacred is shadowed by its degeneration into superstition, Protestant critique by its unintended (fissaparous) consequences, the secular ordinary by stark disenchantment. Shakespeare shows how all three perspectives are needed if society is to face its intractable problems, thus providing a powerful model for our own ecumenical dialogues. Shakespeare begins with history plays contrasting the saintly but impractical King Henry VI, whose assassination is the ”primal crime,” with the pragmatic and secular Henry IV, until imagining in the later 1590’s how Hal can reconnect with sacred sources. At the same time in his comedies, Shakespeare imagines cooperative ways of resolving the national ”comedy of errors,” of sorting out erotic and marital and contemplative confusions by applying his triple lens. His late Elizabethan comedies achieve a polished balance of wit and devotion, ordinary and the sacred, old and new orders. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ultimate Elizabethan consideration of these issues, its so-called lack of objective correlation a response to the unsorted trauma of the Reformation.

Download or read book Shakespeare Theology and the Unstaged God written by Anthony D. Baker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many scholars in Shakespeare and Religious Studies assume a secularist viewpoint in their interpretation of Shakespeare’s works, there are others that allow for a theologically coherent reading. Located within the turn to religion in Shakespeare studies, this book goes beyond the claim that Shakespeare simply made artistic use of religious material in his drama. It argues that his plays inhabit a complex and rich theological atmosphere, individually, by genre and as a body of work. The book begins by acknowledging that a plot-controlling God figure, or even a consistent theological dogma, is largely absent in the plays of Shakespeare. However, it argues that this absence is not necessarily a sign of secularization, but functions in a theologically generative manner. It goes on to suggest that the plays reveal a consistent, if variant, attention to the theological possibility of a divine "presence" mediated through human wit, both in gracious and malicious forms. Without any prejudice for divine intervention, the plots actually gesture on many turns toward a hidden supernatural "actor", or God. Making bold claims about the artistic and theological of Shakespeare’s work, this book will be of interest to scholars of Theology and the Arts, Shakespeare and Literature more generally.

Download or read book Marlowe Shakespeare and the Economy of Theatrical Experience written by Thomas Cartelli and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the structure of psychological, social and political exchanges that were negotiated between audiences and plays in Elizabethan public theatres in a period ostensibly dominated by Shakespeare, but strongly rooted in Marlowe.

Download or read book Shakespeare and Literary Theory written by Jonathan Gil Harris and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. How is it that the British literary critic Terry Eagleton can say that 'it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida', or that the Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek can observe that 'Shakespeare without doubt had read Lacan'? Shakespeare and Literary Theory argues that literary theory is less an external set of ideas anachronistically imposed on Shakespeare's texts than a mode - or several modes - of critical reflection inspired by, and emerging from, his writing. These modes together constitute what we might call 'Shakespearian theory': theory that is not just about Shakespeare but also derives its energy from Shakespeare. To name just a few examples: Karl Marx was an avid reader of Shakespeare and used Timon of Athens to illustrate aspects of his economic theory; psychoanalytic theorists from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan have explained some of their most axiomatic positions with reference to Hamlet; Michel Foucault's early theoretical writing on dreams and madness returns repeatedly to Macbeth; Jacques Derrida's deconstructive philosophy is articulated in dialogue with Shakespeare's plays, including Romeo and Juliet; French feminism's best-known essay is Hélène Cixous's meditation on Antony and Cleopatra; certain strands of queer theory derive their impetus from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's reading of the Sonnets; Gilles Deleuze alights on Richard III as an exemplary instance of his theory of the war machine; and postcolonial theory owes a large debt to Aimé Césaire's revision of The Tempest. By reading what theoretical movements from formalism and structuralism to cultural materialism and actor-network theory have had to say about and in concert with Shakespeare, we can begin to get a sense of how much the DNA of contemporary literary theory contains a startling abundance of chromosomes - concepts, preoccupations, ways of using language - that are of Shakespearian provenance.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Lives written by Samuel Schoenbaum and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a study of the changing images and differing ways that the life of English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has been interpreted throughout history. The author takes readers on a tour of the countless myths and legends which have arisen to explain the great dramatist's life and work, bringing the story right up to 1989. He reconstructs as much of the elusive author's life as possible, considering his family history, his economic standing, and his reputation with his peers; the Shakespeare who emerges may not always be the familiar one.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Extremes written by Julián Jiménez Heffernan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's Extremes is a controversial intervention in current critical debates on the status of the human in Shakespeare's work. By focusing on three flagrant cases of human exorbitance - Edgar, Caliban and Julius Caesar - this book seeks to limn out the domain of the human proper in Shakespeare.

Download or read book A Kind of Wild Justice written by Linda Anderson and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study demonstrates not only that the devices of revenge are structurally useful in comedy, but also that there is a consistent conception of revenge as an ethical social instrument in the comedies of Shakespeare.

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 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume freshly illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs, practices and issues, and their representation in Shakespeare's plays.

Download or read book The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare written by Charles LaPorte and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why did Victorian culture make Shakespeare into a literary deity and his work into a secular Bible?

Download or read book Shakespeare s Sceptered Isle written by Brian Carroll and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work searches Shakespeare's history and Roman plays to find the raw materials of English national consciousness and identity. The messages of Shakespeare's history plays are not principally the plots or "facts" of the dramas but the attitudes and imaginings they elicited in audiences. Reading Shakespeare through the lens of national identity is a study almost as old as the plays themselves, and many scholars have found various articulations of nationhood in Shakespeare's plays. This book argues that Shakespeare's histories furnished modern England with a curriculum for constructing a national identity, a confidence of language and culture, and a powerful new medium through which to communicate and express this negotiated identity. Highlighting the application of semiotics, it studies the playwright's use of symbols, metonymy, symbolic codes, and metaphor. By examining what Shakespeare and playgoers remembered and forgot, as well as the ways ideas were framed, this book explores how a national identity was crafted, contested, and circulated.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Possible Worlds written by Simon Palfrey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simon Palfrey offers a new way of understanding Shakespeare's playworlds, with piercingly original readings of language, scenes, and characters.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare s Poetry written by Jonathan Post and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry provides the widest coverage yet of Shakespeare's poetry and its afterlife in English and other languages.

Download or read book Christian Settings in Shakespeare s Tragedies written by D. Douglas Waters and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 1994 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Battenhouse's Shakespearean tragedy: Its art and Christian premises, Irving Ribner's Patterns in Shakespearian tragedy, Virgil K. Whitaker's The mirror up to nature: The techniques of Shakespeare's tragedies, and Robert Grams Hunter's Shakespeare and the mystery of God's judgments. Waters questions, for example, Battenhouse's validity of Christian theological and didactic emphases on the old purgation theory of catharsis. His approach differs also from Northrop Frye's views on the tragedies in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, an archetypal approach to representative plays including the tragedies.

Download or read book Shakespeare in Succession written by Michael Saenger and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-02-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It may certainly be said that nothing can be assumed about Shakespeare: on the one hand, the Elizabethan poet seems to be thriving, with more editions, productions, studies, and translations appearing every year; on the other hand, in a time of global crisis and decolonization, the question of why Shakespeare is relevant at all is now more pertinent than ever. Shakespeare in Succession approaches the question of relevance by positioning Shakespeare as a participant as well as an object of adaptive translation, a labour that has always mediated between the foreign and the domestic, between the past and the present, between the arcane and the urgent. The volume situates Shakespeare on a continuum of transfers that can be understood from cultural, spatial, temporal, or linguistic points of view by studying how the text of Shakespeare is transformed into other languages and examining Shakespeare himself as a kind of translator of previous times, older stories, and prior theatrical and linguistic systems. Contending with the poet’s contemporary fate, Shakespeare in Succession asks how Shakespeare’s work can be offered to the multicultural present in which we live, and how we might relate our position to that of the iconic writer.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Alternative Tales written by Leah Scragg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for the understanding of his work. In re-telling a particular story, a Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern spectator but an essential component, for a contemporary audience, of the meaning of the work. Shakespeare's Alternative Tales explores this literary dialogue, focusing on those plays in which the expectations generated by an inherited story are in some way overthrown, setting up a tension for a Renaissance spectator between 'received' and 'alternative' readings of the text. Each chapter opens with a familiar story, supplying a context for the subsequent discussion, and exhibits the way in which the dramatist's reworking of a traditional motif interrogates the assumptions implicit in his source. While offering the twentieth-century reader a fresh perspective from which to view the plays, the approach also supplies an introduction to contemporary readings of the Shakespearean canon. The tales Leah Scragg considers may be seen as 'alternative' in more than one sense: they radically rework conventional situations, while lending themselves to analysis in terms of new critical methodologies. The text will be of interest to both students of Shakespeare and the general reader. In conjunction with the author's companion volume, Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales, it provides an ideal introduction to contemporary developments in source studies.