Download or read book Perspectives on Politics in Shakespeare written by John A. Murley and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006-08-11 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political science is becoming ever more reliant on abstract statistical models and almost divorced from human judgment, hope, and idealism. William Shakespeare offers the political scientist an antidote to this methodological alienation, this self-imposed exile from the political concerns of citizens and politicians. Shakespeare, the most quoted author in the English-speaking world, presents his characters as rulers, citizens, and statesmen of the most famous regimes, governed by their respective laws and shaped by their respective political and social institutions. The actions, deliberations, mistakes, and successes of his characters reveal the limitations and strengths of their regimes, whether they be Athens, Rome, or England. The contributors to this volume, esteemed scholars of political science, show us that Shakespeare's poetic imagination displays the very essence of politics and inspires valuable reflection on the fundamental questions of statesmanship and political leadership. Perspectives on Shakespeare's Politics explores such themes as classical republicanism and liberty, the rule of law and morality, the nature and limits of statesmanship, and the character of democracy.
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 and the Nature of Love written by Marcus Nordlund and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-27 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare’s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about love, biology, and culture raised by his method, Nordlund considers four specific forms of love in seven of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the vicissitudes of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, he argues that Shakespeare makes a sustained inquiry into the impact of culture and society upon the natural human affections. King Lear offers insight into the conflicted relationship between love and duty. In two problem plays about romantic love, Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well, the tension between individual idiosyncrasies and social consensus becomes especially salient. And finally, in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, Nordlund asks what Shakespeare can tell us about the dark avatar of jealousy.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Politics written by Lionel Charles Knights and published by . This book was released on 1969* with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Perspectives on Politics in Shakespeare written by John Albert Murley and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows us that Shakespeare's poetic imagination displays the essence of politics and inspires reflection on the fundamental questions of statesmanship and political leadership. This book explores themes such as classical republicanism and liberty, the rule of law and morality, the nature and limits of statesmanship, and the character of democracy.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Political Way written by Elizabeth Frazer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of Shakespeare and politics often ask the question whether his dramas are on the side of aristocratic or monarchical sovereign authority, or are on the side of those who resist; whether he endorses a standard view of male and patriarchal authority, or whether his cross-dressing heroines put him among feminist thinkers. Scholars also show that Shakespeare's representations of rule, revolt, and arguments about laws and constitutions draw on and allude to stories and real events that were contemporaneous for him, as well as historical ones. Building on scholarship about Shakespeare and politics, this book argues that Shakespeare's representations and stagings of political power, sovereignty, resistance, and controversy are more complex. The merits of political life, as opposed to life governed by monetary exchange, religious truth, supernatural power, military heroism, or interpersonal love, are rehearsed in the plots. And the clashing and contradictory meanings of politics — its association with free truthful speech but also with dishonest hypocrisy, with open action and argument as much as occult behind the scenes manoevring — are dramatized by him, to show that although violence, lies, and authoritarianism do often win out in the world there is another kind of politics, and a political way that we would do well to follow when we can. The book offers original readings of the characters and plots of Shakespeare's dramas in order to illustrate the subtlety of his pictures of political power, how it works, and what is wrong and right with it.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Politics written by Robin Headlam Wells and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-03-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the political and historical context to Shakespeare's tragedy and history plays, written in an accessible, jargon-free style.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Nature of Politics written by S. Nagarajan and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Soul of Statesmanship written by Khalil M. Habib and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare’s plays explore a staggering range of political topics, from the nature of tyranny, to the practical effects of Christianity on politics and the family, to the meaning and practice of statesmanship. From great statesmen like Burke and Lincoln to the American frontiersman sitting by his rustic fire, those wrestling with the problems of the human soul and its confrontation with a puzzling world of political peril and promise have long considered these plays a source of political wisdom. The chapters in this volume support and illuminate this connection between Shakespearean drama and politics by examining a matter of central concern in both domains: the human soul. By depicting a bewildering variety of characters as they seek happiness and self-knowledge in the context of differing political regimes, family ties, religious duties, friendships, feuds, and poetic inspirations, Shakespeare illuminates the complex interdynamics between self-rule and political governance, educating readers by compelling us to share in the struggles of and relate to the tensions felt by each character in a way that no political treatise or lecture can. The authors of this volume, drawing upon expertise in fields such as political philosophy, American government, and law, explore the Bard’s dramatization of perennial questions about human nature, moral virtue, and statesmanship, demonstrating that reading his plays as works of philosophical literature enhances our understanding of political life and provides a source of advice and inspiration for the citizens and statesmen of today and tomorrow.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Anti Politics written by D. Gil and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that Shakespeare is anti-political, dissecting the nature of the nation-state and charting a surprising form of resistance to it, using sovereign power against itself to engineer new forms of selfhood and relationality that escape the orbit of the nation-state. It is these new experiences that the book terms 'the life of the flesh'.
Download or read book How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage written by Peter Lake and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of virtue -- Honour and its enemies: women on top - again -- Anti-popery -- Divided we fall: the politics of faction in time of war -- CHAPTER 6 Richard III: political ends, providential means -- The making of a Machiavel -- Monstrous bodies and providential signs -- Signs and prophecies -- The audience as 'high all- seer' -- Ambiguities of 'evil counsel' -- From providence to predestination: the return of legitimacy -- Richard III as a guide to the past, present and future -- CHAPTER 7 Going Roman: Richard III and Titus Andronicus compared
Download or read book Thinking with Shakespeare written by Julia Reinhard Lupton and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? What are their rights? To whom are they obligated? Such questions - bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life - animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has been obscured by historicist approaches to literature.
Download or read book Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes written by Andrew Moore and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare’s political outlook by comparing some of the playwright’s best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. By situating Shakespeare ‘between’ these two thinkers, the distinctly modern trajectory of the playwright’s work becomes visible. Throughout his career, Shakespeare interrogates the divine right of kings, absolute monarchy, and the metaphor of the body politic. Simultaneously he helps to lay the groundwork for modern politics through his dramatic explorations of consent, liberty, and political violence. We can thus understand Shakespeare’s corpus as a kind of eulogy: a funeral speech dedicated to outmoded and deficient theories of politics. We can also understand him as a revolutionary political thinker who, along with Machiavelli and Hobbes, reimagined the origins and ends of government. All three thinkers understood politics primarily as a response to our mortality. They depict politics as the art of managing and organizing human bodies—caring for their needs, making space for the satisfaction of desires, and protecting them from the threat of violent death. This book features new readings of Shakespeare’s plays that illuminate the playwright’s major political preoccupations and his investment in materialist politics.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Politics written by Bruce E. Altschuler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Shakespeare, more than any other author, was able to capture the essence of human nature in all its manifestations. His political plays offer enduring insights into our humanity, our vanity, our noble and baser drives, what makes us great, and what makes us loathsome. He tells us about ourselves and about our world. This volume gleans valuable lessons from the writings of William Shakespeare and applies them to contemporary politics. Original chapters covering over a dozen different plays take up perennial political themes including power and leadership, corruption and virtue, war and peace, evil and liberty, persuasion and polarization, and empire and global overreach.Features of the text:
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Nature of Man written by Theodore Spencer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysing Shakespeare's historical background and craft, Spencer's 1943 study investigates the intellectual debates of Shakespeare's age, and the effect these had on the drama of the time. The book outlines the key conflict present in the sixteenth century - the optimistic ideal of man's place in the universe, as presented by the theorists of the time, set against the indisputable and ever-present fact of original sin. This conflict about the nature of man, argues Spencer, is perhaps the deepest underlying cause for the emergence of great Renaissance drama. With detailed reference to Shakespeare's great tragedies, the book demonstrates how Shakespeare presents the fact of evil masked by the appearance of good. Shakespeare's last plays, especially The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, are also analysed in detail to show how they embody a different view from the tragedies, and the discussion is related to the larger perspective of general human experience.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Political Realism written by Tim Spiekerman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2001-01-25 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides fresh interpretations of five of Shakespeare's history plays (King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V), each guided by the often criticized assumption that Shakespeare can teach us something about politics. In contrast to many contemporary political critics who treat Shakespeare's political dramas as narrow reflections of his time, the author maintains that Shakespeare's political vision is wide-ranging, compelling, and relevant to modern audiences. Paying close attention to character and context, as well as to Shakespeare's creative use of history, the author explores Shakespeare's views on perennially important political themes such as ambition, legitimacy, tradition, and political morality. Particular emphasis is placed on Shakespeare's relation to Machiavelli, turning repeatedly to the conflict between ambition and justice. In the end, Shakespeare's history plays point to the limits of politics even more pessimistically than Machiavelli's realism.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Body Politic written by Bernard J. Dobski and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: mate Shakespeare’s corpus, and one of the most prominent is the image of the body. Sketched out in the eternal lines of his plays and poetry, and often drawn in exquisite detail, variations on the body metaphor abound in the works of Shakespeare. Attention to the political dimensions of this metaphor in Shakespeare and the Body Politic permits readers to examine the sentiments of romantic love and family life, the enjoyment of peace, prosperity and justice, and the spirited pursuit of honor and glory as they inevitably emerge within the social, moral, and religious limits of particular political communities. The lessons to be learned from such an examination are both timely and timeless. For the tensions between the desires and pursuits of individuals and the health of the community forge the sinews of every body politic, regardless of the form it may take or even where and when one might encounter it. In his plays and poetry Shakespeare illuminates these tensions within the body politic, which itself constitutes the framework for a flourishing community of human beings and citizens—from the ancient city-states of Greece and Rome to the Christian cities and kingdoms of early modern Europe. The contributors to this volume attend to the political context and role of political actors within the diverse works of Shakespeare that they explore. Their arguments thus exhibit together Shakespeare’s political thought. By examining his plays and poetry with the seriousness they deserve, Shakespeare’s audiences and readers not only discover an education in human and political virtue, but also find themselves written into his lines. Shakespeare’s body of work is indeed politic, and the whole that it forms incorporates us all.
