Download or read book The Comedy of Errors written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Four Comedies written by William Shakespeare and published by Bantam Classics. This book was released on 2009-08-26 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Taming of the Shrew Robust and bawdy, The Taming of the Shrew captivates audiences with outrageous humor as Katharina, the shrew, engages in a contest of wills–and love–with her bridegroom, Petruchio, in a comedy of unmatched theatrical brilliance, filled with visual gags and witty repartee. A Midsummer Night's Dream Fairy magic, love spells, and an enchanted wood turn the mismatched rivalries of four young lovers into a marvelous mix-up of desire and enchantment, all touched by Shakespeare’s inimitable vision of the intriguing relationship between dreams and the waking world. The Merchant of Venice This dark comedy of love and money contains one of the truly mythic figures in literature–Shylock, the Jewish moneylender. The “pound of flesh” he demands as payment of Antonio’s debt has become a universal metaphor for vengeance. Here, pathos and farce combine with moral complexity and romantic entanglements, to display the extraordinary power and range of Shakespeare at his best. Twelfth Night Set in a topsy-turvy world like a holiday revel, this comedy juxtaposes a romantic plot involving separated twins and mistaken identity with a more satiric one about the humiliation of a pompous killjoy. The hilarity is touched with melancholy, and the play ends, not with laughter, but with a clown’s plaintive song. Each Edition Includes: • Comprehensive explanatory notes • Vivid introductions and the most up-to-date scholarship • Clear, modernized spelling and punctuation, enabling contemporary readers to understand the Elizabethan English • Completely updated, detailed bibliographies and performance histories • An interpretive essay on film adaptations of the play, along with an extensive filmography

Download or read book The Evolution of Shakespeare s Comedy written by Larry S. Champion and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of Shakespeare's comedy, in Larry Champion's view, is apparent in the expansion of his comic vision to include a complete reflection of human life while maintaining a comic detachment for the audience. Like the other popular dramatists of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare used the diverse comic motifs and devices which time and custom had proved effective. He went further, however, and created progressively deeper levels of characterization and plot interaction, thereby forming characters who were not merely devices subordinated to the needs of the plot. Shakespeare's development as a comic playwright, suggests Champion, was "consistently in the direction of complexity or depth of characterization." His earliest works, like those of his contemporaries, are essentially situation comedies: the humor arises from action rather than character. There is no significant development of the main characters; instead, they are manipulated into situations which are humorous as a result, for example, of mistaken identity or slapstick confusion. The ensuing phase of Shakespeare's comedy sets forth plots in which the emphasis is on identity rather than physical action, a revelation of character which occurs in one of two forms: either a hypocrite is exposed for what he actually is or a character who has assumed an unnatural or abnormal pose is forced to realize and admit the ridiculousness of his position. In the final comedies involving sin and sacrificial forgiveness, however, character development is concerned with a "transformation of values." Although each of the comedies is discussed, Champion concentrates on nine, dividing them according to the complexity of characterization. He pursues as well the playwright's efforts to achieve for the spectator the detached stance so vital to comedy. Shakespeare obtained this perspective, Champion observes, through experimentation with the use of material mirroring the main action--mockery, parody, or caricature--and through the use of a "comic pointer" who is himself involved in the action but is sufficiently independent of the other characters to provide the audience with an omniscient view.

Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare s Comedies written by Penny Gay and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did theatre audiences laugh in Shakespeare's day? Why do they still laugh now? What did Shakespeare do with the conventions of comedy that he inherited, so that his plays continue to amuse and move audiences? What do his comedies have to say about love, sex, gender, power, family, community, and class? What place have pain, cruelty, and even death in a comedy? Why all those puns? In a survey that travels from Shakespeare's earliest experiments in farce and courtly love-stories to the great romantic comedies of his middle years and the mould-breaking experiments of his last decade's work, this book addresses these vital questions. Organised thematically, and covering all Shakespeare's comedies from the beginning to the end of his career, it provides readers with a map of the playwright's comic styles, showing how he built on comedic conventions as he further enriched the possibilities of the genre.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy written by Heather Hirschfeld and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

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 and the Comedy of Enchantment written by Kent Cartwright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment argues that enchantment constitutes a key emotional and intellectual dimension of Shakespeare's comedies. It thus makes a new claim about the rejuvenating value of comedy for individuals and society. Shakespeare's comedies orchestrate ongoing encounters between the rational and the mysterious, between doubt and fascination, with feelings moved by elements of enchantment that also seem a little ridiculous. In such a drama, lines of causality become complex, and even satisfying endings leave certain matters incomplete and contingent—openings for scrutiny and thought. In addressing enchantment, the book takes exception to the modernist vision of a deterministic 'disenchanted' world. As Shakespeare's action advances, comic mysteries accrue—uncanny coincidences; magical sympathies; inexplicable repetitions; psychic influences; and puzzlements about the meaning of events—all of whose numinous effects linger ambiguously after reason has apparently answered the play's questions. Separate chapters explore the devices, tropes, and motifs of enchantment: magical clowns who alter the action through stop-time interludes; structural repetitions that suggest mysteriously converging, even opaquely providential destinies; locales that oppose magical and protean forces to regulatory and quotidian values; desires, thoughts, and utterances that 'manifest' comically monstrous events; characters who return from the dead, facilitated by the desires of the living; play-endings crossed by harmony and dissonance, with moments of wonder that make possible the mysterious action of forgiveness. Wonder and wondering in Shakespeare's and other comedies, it emerges, become the conditions for new possibilities. Chapters refer extensively to early modern history, Renaissance and modern theories of comedy, treatises on magical science, and contemporaneous Italian and Tudor comedy.

Download or read book One Hour Shakespeare written by Julie Fain Lawrence-Edsell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The One-Hour Shakespeare series is a collection of abridged versions of Shakespeare’s plays, designed specifically to accommodate both small and large casts. This volume, The Comedies, includes the following plays: As You Like It Love’s Labour’s Lost Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night These accessible and versatile scripts are supported by: an introduction with emphasis on the evolution of the series and the creative process of editing; the One-Hour projects in performance, a chapter on implementing money-saving ideas and suggestions for production whether in or outside a classroom setting; specific lesson plans to incorporate these projects successfully into an academic course; and cross-gender casting suggestions. These supplementary materials make the plays valuable not only for actors, directors and professors, but for any environment, cast or purpose. Ideal for both academics and professionals, One-Hour Shakespeare is the perfect companion to teaching and staging the most universally read and performed playwright in history.

Download or read book Shakespeare the Uses of Comedy written by Joseph Allen Bryant and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 1986 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse. Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early a.

Download or read book Gender and Performance in Shakespeare s Problem Comedies written by David F. McCandless and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-22 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is exactly the kind of work, with its synthesis of theory, close reading, and deconstructive performance criticism that many of us in the profession have been looking for." -- Joel B. Altman, University of California, Berkeley "McCandless's book represents an inventive and illuminating account that not only produces a theoretically activated text but also explores a range of options for staging it, turning theoretical into theatrical meanings." -- Barbara Hodgdon, Drake University "The writing is clear, snappy, wonderfully informed with a vivid and experienced theatrical imagination... a book that taught me a good deal about the problem comedies, especially from the vantage point of performance, though the insights into performance are fully and incisively integrated with, and they richly illuminate, formal, thematic, and psychological vantage points on the play." -- Richard P. Wheeler, University of Illinois Composed at a critical moment in English history, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida -- Shakespeare's problem plays -- dramatize a crisis in the sex-gender system. They register a male dread of emasculation and engulfment, a fear of female authority and sexuality. In these plays males identify desire for a female as dangerous and unmanly, females contend and confound traditional femininity. David McCandless's book is a unique and invigorating example of performance criticism that illuminates these difficult, sometimes-overlooked tragicomedies. It is an original and timely contribution to Shakespearean theater scholarship.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Festive Comedy written by Cesar Lombardi Barber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. "I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.

Download or read book Shakespeare s Comedies written by Ralph Berry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lucid and original study, first published in 1972, Ralph Berry discusses the ten comedies that run from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night. Berry’s purpose is to identify the form of each play by relating the governing idea of the play to the action that expresses it. To this end the author employs a variety of standpoints and techniques, and taken together, these chapters present a lively and coherent view of Shakespeare’s techniques, concerns, and development. This title will be of interests to students of literature and drama.

Download or read book The Great Comedies and Tragedies written by William Shakespeare and published by Wordsworth Editions. This book was released on 2005 with total page 900 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection of the finest of Shakespeare's plays presents Shakespeare's comedies with introductions by Judith Buchanan and tragedies with introductions by Emma Smith

Download or read book One Hour Shakespeare written by Julie Fain Lawrence-Edsell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The One-Hour Shakespeare series is a collection of abridged versions of Shakespeare’s plays, designed specifically to accommodate both small and large casts. This volume, More Comedies and Tragedies, includes the following plays: The Comedy of Errors The Taming of the Shrew Antony and Cleopatra King Lear These accessible and versatile scripts are supported by: an introduction with emphasis on the evolution of the series and the creative process of editing; the One-Hour projects in performance, a chapter on implementing money-saving ideas and suggestions for production whether in or outside of a classroom setting; specific lesson plans to incorporate these projects successfully into an academic course; suggested casting assignments for small to large casts; the how-tos of producing a radio play; and cross-gender casting suggestions. These supplementary materials make the plays valuable not only for actors, but for any environment, cast or purpose. Ideal for both academics and professionals, One-Hour Shakespeare is the perfect companion to teaching and staging the most universally read and performed playwright in history.

Download or read book Four Great Comedies written by William Shakespeare and published by Signet Classics. This book was released on 1982 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest works of comedy from the Bard, this book features "The Taming ofthe Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night" and "The Tempest". Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Download or read book Shakespeare and Classical Comedy written by Robert S. Miola and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1994 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys Shakespeare's comedies, charting the influence upon them of the ancient playwrights, Plautus and Terence. Robert S. Miola analyses these sources, and places the comedies in their Renaissance context, as well as in the larger context of European theatre. Discovering new indebtedness, and discerning new patterns in previously attested borrowings, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy presents an integrated and comprehensive assessment of the complex interactions of the Classical, Shakespearean, and other Renaissance theatres. Robert S. Miola re-evaluates Plautus and Terence in the light of their Greek antecedents, and gives special attention to Renaissance translations and commentaries, Italian theorists, and playwrights, as well as contemporary dramatists such as Middleton, Jonson, Heywood, and Chapman. Four broad categories organize the discussion - New Comedic errors, intrigue, alazoneia (pretension), and romance - and each is illustrated by illuminating readings of individual Shakespearean plays. The author keeps in view Shakespeare's eclecticism, his habit of combining disparate sources and traditions, as well as the rich history of literary criticism and theatrical interpretation. The book concludes by discussing the presence of New Comedy in tragedy, in Hamlet and King Lear. Robert S. Miola's thoroughly researched book ranges over a vast amount of European drama, from Aristophanes to Beckett and Ionesco. It makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of Shakespeare and his foremost antecedents, but also of Renaissance theatre, and its complex adaptations of ancient texts and traditions.

Download or read book Three Comedies written by William Shakespeare and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authoritative edition of Three Comedies from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers. The havoc wrought on lovers by magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the furious battle of the sexes waged in The Taming of the Shrew, and a stranded woman finding her way in a man’s world in Twelfth Night—this collection of three of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies is based on the acclaimed individual Folger editions of the plays. The authoritative edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes: Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play -Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play -Scene-by-scene plot summaries -A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases -An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play -Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books -An annotated guide to further reading The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.