Download or read book Shakespearean Metadrama written by James L. Calderwood and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1971-03-10 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespearean Metadrama was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In a new approach to Shakespeare criticism, the author interprets five of Shakespeare's early plays as metadramas, dramas that are not only about the various moral, social, political, and other thematic issues with which critics have so long been concerned but also about the plays themselves. Professor Calderwood demonstrates that in these five plays Shakespeare writes about his dramatic art -- its nature, its media of language and theater, its generic forms and conventions, its relationship to truth and the social order. In an introductory chapter the author explains his theory of metadrama, placing it in a general critical context as well as in the specific framework of Shakespeare's plays. He distinguishes between the meaning of metadrama and the similar terms "metaplay" and "metatheare." He points out that the dominant metadramatic aspect of the five plays under study is the interplay of language and action in drama. A separate chapter is devoted to the interpretation of each of the plays. Professor Calderwood is aware that in presenting his critical theory and interpretations he may be met with skepticism by other scholars and critics. He anticipates such a situation in the introduction: "To the critic trying on introductory styles for a book on Shakespearean metadrama," he writes, "the plight of Falstaff at the Boar's Head Tavern comes all to readily to mind. 'What trick," he must ask himself, 'what device, what starting-hole, canst thou now find out to hide thee from this open and apparent shame?'"
Download or read book Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson written by Bill Angus and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever wondered what was really going on in the inner-plays, secret overhearing, and tacit observations of early modern drama? Taking on the shadowy figure of the early modern informer, this book argues that far more than mere artistic experimentation is happening here. In case studies of metadramatic plays, and the devices which Shakespeare and Jonson constantly revisit, this book offers critical insight into intrinsic connections between informers and authors, discovering an uneasy sense of common practice at the core of the metadrama, which drives both its self-awareness and its paranoia. Drama is most self-revealing at these moments where it reflects upon its own dramatic register: where it is most metadramatic. To understand their metadrama is therefore to understand these most seminal authors in a new way.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Dramatic Transactions written by Michael Mooney and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991-07-31 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare’s Dramatic Transactions uses conventions of performance criticism—staging and theatrical presentation—to analyze seven major Shakespearean tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard II, and Richard III. As scholars and readers increasingly question the theoretical models used to describe the concepts of “mimesis” and “representation,” this book describes how the actor’s stage presentation affects the actor’s representational role and the ways in which viewers experience Shakespearean tragedy. Michael Mooney draws on the work of East German critic Robert Weimann and his concept of figurenposition—the correlation between an actor’s stage location and the speech, action, and stylization associated with that position—to understand the actor/stage location relationship in Shakespeare’s plays. In his examination of the original staging of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Mooney looks at the traditional interplay between a downstage “place” and upstage “location” to describe the difference between non-illusionistic action (often staged near the audience) and the illusionistic, localized action that characterizes mimetic art. The innovative and insightful approach of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Transactions brings together the techniques of performance criticism and the traditional literary study of Shakespearean tragedy. In showing how the distinctions of stage location illuminate the interaction among language, representation, Mooney’s compelling argument enhances our understanding of Shakespeare and the theater.
Download or read book O Neill s Shakespeare written by Normand Berlin and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals unexplored links between Shakespeare's plays and the work of Eugene O'Neill
Download or read book Shakespeare s book written by Richard Meek and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays is part of a new phase in Shakespeare studies. The traditional view of Shakespeare is that he was a man of the theatre who showed no interest in the printing of his plays, producing works that are only fully realised in performance. This view has recently been challenged by critics arguing that Shakespeare was a literary ‘poet-playwright’, concerned with his readers as well as his audiences. Shakespeare’s Book offers a vital contribution to this critical debate, and examines its wider implications for how we conceive of Shakespeare and his works. Bringing together an impressive group of international Shakespeare scholars, the volume explores both Shakespeare’s relationship with actual printers, patrons, and readers, and the representation of writing, reading, and print within his works themselves.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Theatres and the Effects of Performance written by Farah Karim Cooper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Elizabethan and Jacobean acting companies create their visual and aural effects? What materials were available to them and how did they influence staging and writing? What impact did the sensations of theatre have on early modern audiences? How did the construction of the playhouses contribute to technological innovations in the theatre? What effect might these innovations have had on the writing of plays? Shakespeare's Theatres and The Effects of Performance is a landmark collection of essays by leading international scholars addressing these and other questions to create a unique and comprehensive overview of the practicalities and realities of the theatre in the early modern period.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy written by Alexander Leggatt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Histories written by Emma Smith and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Guide steers students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s history plays, enhancing their enjoyment and broadening their critical repertoire. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s history plays. Covers both significant early views and recent critical interventions. Substantial editorial material links the articles and places them in context. Annotated suggestions for further reading allow students to investigate further.
Download or read book Shakespeare Left and Right written by Ivo Kamps and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare Left and Right brings together critics, strikingly different in their politics and methodologies, who are acutely aware of the importance of politics on literary practice and theory. Should, for example, feminist criticism be subjected to a critique by voices it construes as hostile to its political agenda? Is it possible to present a critique of feminist criticism without implicitly impeding its politics? And, in the light of recent political events should the Right pronounce the demise of Marxism as a social science and interpretive tool? The essays in Shakespeare Left and Right, first published in 1991, present a tug of war about ideology, acted out over the body of Shakespeare. Part One focuses on the challenge thrown down by Richard Levin's widely discussed "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy". Part Two considers these issues in relation to critical practice and the reading of specific plays. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics interested in Shakespeare studies.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Double Plays written by Brett Gamboa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first comprehensive study of how Shakespeare designed his plays to suit his playing company, Brett Gamboa demonstrates how Shakespeare turned his limitations to creative advantage, and how doubling roles suited his unique sense of the dramatic. By attending closely to their dramaturgical structures, Gamboa analyses casting requirements for the plays Shakespeare wrote for the company between 1594 and 1610, and describes how using the embedded casting patterns can enhance their thematic and theatrical potential. Drawing on historical records, dramatic theory, and contemporary performance this innovative work questions received ideas about early modern staging and provides scholars and contemporary theatre practitioners with a valuable guide to understanding how casting can help facilitate audience engagement. Supported by an appendix of speculative doubling charts for plays, illustrations, and online resources, this is a major contribution to the understanding of Shakespeare's dramatic craft.
Download or read book Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare written by Richard Meek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Shakespeare's fascination with the art of narrative and the visuality of language. Richard Meek complicates our conception of Shakespeare as either a 'man of the theatre' or a 'literary dramatist', suggesting ways in which his works themselves debate the question of text versus performance. Beginning with an exploration of the pictorialism of Shakespeare's narrative poems, the book goes on to examine several moments in Shakespeare's dramatic works when characters break off the action to describe an absent, 'offstage' event, place or work of art. Meek argues that Shakespeare does not simply prioritise drama over other forms of representation, but rather that he repeatedly exploits the interplay between different types of mimesis - narrative, dramatic and pictorial - in order to beguile his audiences and readers. Setting Shakespeare's works in their literary and rhetorical contexts, and engaging with contemporary literary theory, the book offers new readings of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, King Lear and The Winter's Tale. The book will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between verbal and visual art, theories of representation and mimesis, Renaissance literary and rhetorical culture, and debates regarding Shakespeare's status as a literary dramatist.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Universe of Discourse written by Keir Elam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-06-21 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes ample use of approaches to language within linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language and sociology, in order to do justice to the subtlety of Shakespeare's verbal artistry. Keir Elam adopts a fresh approach to the language of Shakespeare's comedies, considering it not simply as 'style' but as the principal dramatic and comic substance of the plays. Traditional analysis of the language as 'diction', 'expression' or 'verbal structure' is not adequate to describe the range and importance of linguistic functions in these plays. This book shows that in Shakespearean comedy language, or rather 'discourse', language in use, is always a dynamic, active protagonist of the drama. The author explores the extraordinary gamut of verbal activities or 'language-games' that contribute to the rich rhetorical make-up of the comedies. The historical framework complements the application of critical theory which will assure a readership among students and teachers of Shakespeare as well as those interested in liguistics and semiotics.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Poetics written by Ekbert Faas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-01-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tackles the topic of how Shakespeare viewed his own craft and creativity.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Imagined Persons written by P. Murray and published by Springer. This book was released on 1996-05-10 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging our understanding of ideas about psychology in Shakespeare's time, Shakespeare's Imagined Persons proposes we should view his characters as imagined persons. A new reading of B.F. Skinner's radical behaviourism brings out how - contrary to the impression he created - Skinner ascribes an important role in human behaviour to cognitive activity. Using this analysis, Peter Murray demonstrates the consistency of radical behaviourism with the psychology of character formation and acting in writers from Plato to Shakespeare - an approach little explored in the current debates about subjectivity in Elizabethan culture. Murray also shows that radical behaviourism can explain the phenomena observed in modern studies of acting and social role-playing. Drawing on these analyses of earlier and modern psychology, Murray goes on to reveal the dynamics of Shakespeare's characterizations of Hamlet, Prince Hal, Rosalind, and Perdita in a fascinating new light.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Names written by Laurie Maguire and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unusual and fascinating book convinces readers that names matter in Shakespeare's plays - and that playing with names is a serious business. The focus is Shakespeare - in particular, case-studies of Romeo and Juliet, Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida - but the book also shows what Shakespeare inherited and where the topic developed after him.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Character written by P. Yachnin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and Character brings together leading scholars in theory, literary criticism, and performance studies in order to redress a serious gap in Shakespeare studies and to put character back at the centre of our understanding of Shakespeare's achievement as an artist and thinker.
Download or read book Directing Shakespeare written by Sidney Homan and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Professor Homan recounts the experience of staging King Lear accompanied by a musical score for piano, violin, and cello played live onstage. He discusses the challenge of making and trying to justify cuts in Hamlet. The chapter on The Comedy of Errors shows the ways in which scholarly and critical writings can contribute to a director's decisions on everything from casting to acting styles. A casual remark from an actress leads to a feminist production of a Midsummer Night's Dream. He describes the delicate collaboration between director and performer as he works with actors preparing for The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet. Other chapters treat a set designer's bold red drapes that influenced the director's concept for Julius Caesar, and the cross-influence of back-to-back runs of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Hamlet."--BOOK JACKET.
