Download or read book King Lear in our Time written by Maynard Mack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition first published in 1966. Previous edition published 1965 by the University of California Press. Perhaps more than any other play of Shakespeare's King Lear has been subjected to almost totally contradictory interpretations. In the first historical section of the book the author describes the varying concepts of the play and the distortions of text and even plot that have been widely used. Garrick's playing of Lear as a pathetic and down-trodden old man. Laughton's and Olivier's versions and Herbert Blaus's theory of the 'subtext' are described and analysed. The central section of the book examines the medieval, folk and romance sources of the play. The final chapter illustrates how the action of the play and its pervading violence and evil are not explained in terms of human motive and rely for their meaning more on their effects than their antecedents. An important theme is the play's examination of society and the ties of service and family love.
Download or read book King Lear written by Jeffrey Kahan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-04-18 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink
Download or read book Shakespeare s Politics written by Allan Bloom and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1964 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the classical view that the political shapes man's consciousness, Allan Bloom considers Shakespeare as a profoundly political Renaissance dramatist. He aims to recover Shakespeare's ideas and beliefs and to make his work once again a recognized source for the serious study of moral and political problems. In essays looking at Julius Caesar, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Bloom shows how Shakespeare presents a picture of man that does not assume privileged access for only literary criticism. With this claim, he argues that political philosophy offers a comprehensive framework within which the problems of the Shakespearean heroes can be viewed. In short, he argues that Shakespeare was an eminently political author. Also included is an essay by Harry V. Jaffa on the limits of politics in King Lear. "A very good book indeed . . . one which can be recommended to all who are interested in Shakespeare." —G. P. V. Akrigg "This series of essays reminded me of the scope and depth of Shakespeare's original vision. One is left with the impression that Shakespeare really had figured out the answers to some important questions many of us no longer even know to ask."-Peter A. Thiel, CEO, PayPal, Wall Street Journal Allan Bloom was the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor on the Committee on Social Thought and the co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. Harry V. Jaffa is professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School.
Download or read book Shakespeare in Our Time written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death by reflecting on the unrivalled work of the Shakespeare Association of America and offering a unique collection of leading Shakespeare scholars outlining key developments in Shakespeare studies over the last two decades. These essays are complemented by younger scholars who respond and look forward to new fields of study and debate. As such the book offers a "state of the nation" look at Shakespeare criticism, covering all the key areas of research and study including gender, text, performance, the body, history, religion and biography. This is a must-read, comprehensive introduction to the key critical ideas surrounding Shakespeare's work and a stimulating exploration of where Shakespeare studies will go next.
Download or read book King Lear written by Kevin J. Donovan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume documents the reception and interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear by critics, editors and general readers from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. Following an introduction which provides an historical account of the play's critical reception from the earliest times to the present day, the volume presents a selection of original documents, together with contextual head notes and biographical sketches of the authors and a rationale for their selection, as well as a list of suggested further reading. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, whereas the introduction offers a critical evaluation from a current stance, including modern theories and methods. Thus the volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the play and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism surrounding it as they have developed from century to century.
Download or read book Some Facets of King Lear written by Rosalie L. Colie and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1974-12-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of the prism, with its multiple refractions, offers some sense of the inexhaustible variety of a work of art. Like a prism, King Lear is attractive; like a prism, it is a multiply shaped thing; like a prism, it is an object of admiration, as well as an instrument of analysis. The essays in this book – forming neither a casebook nor a 'perplex' – were written because their authors wanted to understand something specific about this very complicated play. Throughout, the emphasis is on Shakespeare's consciousness of his craft, on his critical use of the materials, notions, and devices available to him – on the play (prism-like) as an instrument of analysis. Although the different contributors have occasionally influenced one another's readings of the play, the essays were written independently; that they are so mutually supportive is the result of the play's central insistence on its own primary meaning, visible from whatever perspective a serious reader may take.
Download or read book Re dressing the Canon written by Alisa Solomon and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alisa Solomon examines the relationship between gender and performance in a series of essays that consider theatrical texts and productions, from the time of Aristophanes, through to the modern era.
Download or read book Posthuman Lear written by Craig Dionne and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Be sure to fasten your seatbelts while reading Craig Dionne's POSTHUMAN LEAR. In addition to being a wild ride through time and space, hurtling from late antiquity to post-Fukushima-radiated Japan by way of Shakespeare's motley crew of castaways on a storm-battered heath, the book also offers a reparative salve for our troubled anthropocene. As long as we speak what we feel, and reversing Edgar's famous line, even what we *ought* to say, with the shards and broken fragments of borrowed proverbial speech, we will at least have shelter with each other and with a newly denuded world, and in a consoling if partly ruined human language, from the coming Winter. Eileen JoyCraig Dionne has written Shakespearean criticism as it should be written: theoretically sophisticated, historically situated, while tied to the present moment, and thoroughly engaging as a piece of writing. Posthuman Lear will change the way you think ... about Lear and about the work we do. Sharon O'DairApproaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare's tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being - from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one's interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare's tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of our post-sustainable condition. For Dionne, Lear's progress on the heath works as a parable of flat ontology.At the center of Dionne's analysis of rhetoric and prodigality in the tragedy is the argument that adages and proverbs, working as embodied forms of speech, offer insight into a nonhuman, fragmentary mode of consciousness. The Renaissance fascination with memory and proverbs provides an opportunity to reflect on the human as an instance of such enmeshed being where the habit of articulating memorized patterns of speech works on a somatic level. Dionne theorizes how mnemonic memory functions as a potentially empowering mode of consciousness inherited by our evolutionary history as a species, revealing how our minds work as imprinted machines to recall past prohibitions and useful affective scripts to aid in our interaction with the environment. The proverb is that linguistic inscription that defines the equivalent of human-animal imprinting, where the past is etched upon collective memory within 'adagential' being that lives on through the generations as autonomic cues for survival.Dionne's reimagining of this tragedy is important in the way it places Shakespeare's central existential questions - the meaning of familial love, commitments to friends, our place in a secular world - in a new relation to the main question of surviving within fixed environmental limits. Along the way, Dionne reflects on the larger theoretical implications of recycling the old historicism of early modern culture to speak to an eco-materialism, and why the modernist textual aesthetics of the self-distancing text seems inadequate when considering the uncertainty and trauma that underscores life in a post-sustainable culture. Dionne's final appeal is to "repurpose" our fatalism in the face of ecological disaster.
Download or read book Lear written by Harold Bloom and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, a beloved professor who has taught the Bard for over half a century—an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Lear, arguably Shakespeare’s most tragic and compelling character, the third in a series of five short books hailed as Harold Bloom’s “last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination” (The New York Times Book Review). King Lear is one of the most famous and compelling characters in literature. The aged, abused monarch—a man in his eighties, like Bloom himself—is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from grace and widely agreed to be Shakespeare’s most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. Now he brings that insight to his “measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon” (Kirkus Reviews). “Lear is a “short, superb book that has a depth of observation acquired from a lifetime of study” (Publishers Weekly).
Download or read book The One King Lear written by Sir Brian Vickers and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s influential scholars argued that Shakespeare revised King Lear in light of theatrical performance, resulting in two texts by the bard’s own hand. The two-text theory hardened into orthodoxy. Here Sir Brian Vickers makes the case that Shakespeare did not cut his original text. At stake is the way his greatest play is read and performed.
Download or read book 1606 written by James Shapiro and published by . This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An intimate portrait of one of Shakespeare's most inspired moments: the year of King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. 1606, while a very good year for Shakespeare, is a fraught one for England. Plague returns. There is surprising resistance to the new king's desire to turn England and Scotland into a united Britain. And fear and uncertainty sweep the land and expose deep divisions in the aftermath of the failed terrorist attack that came to be known as the Gunpowder Plot. James Shapiro deftly demonstrates how these extraordinary plays responded to the tumultuous events of this year, events that in unexpected ways touched upon Shakespeare's own life ... [and] profoundly changes and enriches our experience of his plays--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Writing and Reading Differently written by George Douglas Atkins and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shakespearean Criticism written by Michael LaBlanc and published by Shakespearean Criticism. This book was released on 2003 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The plays, theme or focus of this volume includes: Henry VIIIJealousyKing LearThe Tempest
Download or read book Time Space and Structure in King Lear written by Mathilda M. Hills and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lady Romeo written by Tana Wojczuk and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Finalist for the Marfield Prize For fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this “lively, illuminating new biography” (The Boston Globe) of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays a “brisk, beautifully crafted life” (Stacy Schiff, bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra) that riveted New York City and made headlines across America. All her life, Charlotte Cushman refused to submit to others’ expectations. Raised in Boston at the time of the transcendentalists, a series of disasters cleared the way for her life on the stage—a path she eagerly took, rejecting marriage and creating a life of adventure, playing the role of the hero in and out of the theater as she traveled to New Orleans and New York City, and eventually to London and back to build a successful career. Her Hamlet, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Nancy Sykes from Oliver Twist became canon, impressing Louisa May Alcott, who later based a character on her in Jo’s Boys, and Walt Whitman, who raved about “the towering grandeur of her genius” in his columns for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She acted alongside Edwin and John Wilkes Booth—supposedly giving the latter a scar on his neck that was later used to identify him as President Lincoln’s assassin—and visited frequently with the Great Emancipator himself, who was a devoted Shakespeare fan and admirer of Cushman’s work. Her wife immortalized her in the angel at the top of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain; worldwide, she was “a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress.” Behind the scenes, she was equally radical, making an independent income, supporting her family, creating one of the first bohemian artists’ colonies abroad, and living publicly as a queer woman. And yet, her name has since faded into the shadows. Now, her story comes to brilliant life with Tana Wojczuk’s Lady Romeo, an exhilarating and enlightening biography of the 19th-century trailblazer. With new research and rarely seen letters and documents, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of 1800s New York City and featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America forever. The story of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable forgotten figures in our history and restores her to center stage, where she belongs.
Download or read book Learwife written by J.R. Thorp and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2021 'Seductive . . . Gorgeous' The Times 'Gives voice to one of fiction's most conspicuously absent women' i Word has come. King Lear is dead. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear’s queen. Though her grief and rage threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she exiled? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend? And what will become of her now? To find peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice – one upon which her destiny rests.
Download or read book King Lear written by William Shakespeare and published by Signet Classics. This book was released on 1987 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Lear, one of Shakespeare's darkest and most savage plays, tells the story of the foolish and Job-like Lear, who divides his kingdom, as he does his affections, according to vanity and whim. Lear's failure as a father engulfs himself and his world in turmoil and tragedy.
