Download or read book Forensic Shakespeare written by Quentin Skinner and published by Clarendon Lectures in English. This book was released on 2014 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forensic Shakespeare illustrates Shakespeare's creative processes by revealing the intellectual materials out of which some of his most famous works were composed. Focusing on the narrative poem Lucrece, on four of his late Elizabethan plays (Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Hamlet) and on three early Jacobean dramas, (Othello, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well), Quentin Skinner argues that major speeches, and sometimes sequences of scenes, are crafted according to a set of rhetorical precepts about how to develop a persuasive judicial case, either in accusation or defence. Some of these works have traditionally been grouped together as 'problem plays', but here Skinner offers a different explanation for their frequent similarities of tone. There have been many studies of Shakespeare's rhetoric, but they have generally concentrated on his wordplay and use of figures and tropes. By contrast, this study concentrates on Shakespeare's use of judicial rhetoric as a method of argument. By approaching the plays from this perspective, Skinner is able to account for some distinctive features of Shakespeare's vocabulary, and also help to explain why certain scenes follow a recurrent pattern and arrangement. More broadly, he is able to illustrate the extent of Shakespeare's engagement with an entire tradition of classical and Renaissance humanist thought.
Download or read book Forensic Shakespeare written by Quentin Skinner and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forensic Shakespeare illustrates Shakespeare's creative processes by revealing the intellectual materials out of which some of his most famous works were composed. Focusing on the narrative poem Lucrece, on four of his late Elizabethan plays (Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Hamlet) and on three early Jacobean dramas, (Othello, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well), Quentin Skinner argues that major speeches, and sometimes sequences of scenes, are crafted according to a set of rhetorical precepts about how to develop a persuasive judicial case, either in accusation or defence. Some of these works have traditionally been grouped together as 'problem plays', but here Skinner offers a different explanation for their frequent similarities of tone. There have been many studies of Shakespeare's rhetoric, but they have generally concentrated on his wordplay and use of figures and tropes. By contrast, this study concentrates on Shakespeare's use of judicial rhetoric as a method of argument. By approaching the plays from this perspective, Skinner is able to account for some distinctive features of Shakespeare's vocabulary, and also help to explain why certain scenes follow a recurrent pattern and arrangement. More broadly, he is able to illustrate the extent of Shakespeare's engagement with an entire tradition of classical and Renaissance humanist thought.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Dramatic Persons written by Travis Curtright and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons, Travis Curtright examines the influence of the classical rhetorical tradition on early modern theories of acting in a careful study of and selection from Shakespeare’s most famous characters and successful plays. Curtright demonstrates that “personation”—the early modern term for playing a role—is a rhetorical acting style that could provide audiences with lifelike characters and action, including the theatrical illusion that dramatic persons possess interiority or inwardness. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons focuses on major characters such as Richard III, Katherina, Benedick, and Iago and ranges from Shakespeare’s early to late work, exploring particular rhetorical forms and how they function in five different plays. At the end of this study, Curtright envisions how Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s best actor, might have employed the theatrical convention of directly addressing audience members. Though personation clearly differs from the realism aspired to in modern approaches to the stage, Curtright reveals how Shakespeare’s sophisticated use and development of persuasion’s arts would have provided early modern actors with their own means and sense of performing lifelike dramatic persons.
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 Legal Ecologies written by Kevin Curran and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices. At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts. The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource.
Download or read book As You Law It Negotiating Shakespeare written by Daniela Carpi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare was fascinated by law, which permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate the legal texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There was a strong popular participation in the system of justice, and late sixteenth-century playwrights often made use of forensic models of narrative. Uncertainty about legal issues represented a rich potential for causing strong reactions in the public, especially feelings concerning the resistance to tyranny. The volume aims at highlighting some of the many legal perspectives and debates emplotted in Shakespearean plays, also taking into consideration the many texts that have been produced during the latest years on law and literature in the Renaissance.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama written by A. D. Cousins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to provide students and scholars with a truly comprehensive guide to the early modern soliloquy.
Download or read book How the Classics Made Shakespeare written by Jonathan Bate and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book grew from the inaugural E. H. Gombrich Lectures in the Classical Tradition that I delivered in the autumn of 2013 at the Warburg Institute of the University of London, under the title, "Ancient Strength: Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition"--Preface, page ix.
Download or read book Christian Humanism in Shakespeare written by Lee Oser and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian grounds. Stressing Shakespeare’s theological sensitivity, Oser places Shakespeare’s work in the “radical middle,” the dialectical opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of art intended for a catholic (small “c”) audience. It describes the conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his literary purposes. Oser reviews the rival cases for a Protestant Shakespeare and for a Catholic Shakespeare, but leaves the issue open, focusing, instead, on how Shakespeare exploits artistic resources that are specific to Christianity, including the classical-Christian rhetorical tradition. The scope of the book ranges from an introductory survey of the critical field as it now stands, to individual chapters on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, Hamlet, and King Lear. Writing with a deep sense of literary history, Oser holds that mainstream literary criticism has created a false picture of Shakespeare by secularizing him and misconstruing the nature of his art. Through careful study of the plays, Oser recovers a Shakespeare who is less vulnerable to the winds of academic and political fashion, and who is a friend to the enduring project of humanistic education. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare: A Study in Religion and Literature is both eminently readable and a work of consequence.
Download or read book Error in Shakespeare written by Alice Leonard and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional view of Shakespeare’s mastery of the English language is alive and well today. This is an effect of the eighteenth-century canonisation of his works, and subsequently Shakespeare has come to be perceived as the owner of the vernacular. These entrenched attitudes prevent us from seeing the actual substance of the text, and the various types of error that it contains and even constitute it. This book argues that we need to attend to error to interpret Shakespeare’s disputed material text, political-dramatic interventions and famous literariness. The consequences of ignoring error are especially significant in the study of Shakespeare, as he mobilises the rebellious, marginal, and digressive potential of error in the creation of literary drama.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Judgment written by Kevin Curran and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging widely across law, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, this book offers the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaShakespeare and Judgment gathers together an international group of scholars to address for the first time the place of judgment in Shakespearean drama. Contributors approach the topic from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives, covering plays from across Shakespeare's career and from each of the genres in which he wrote. Anchoring the volume are two critical contentions: first, that attending to Shakespeare's treatment of judgment leads to fresh insights about the imaginative relationship between law, theater, and aesthetics in early modern England; and second, that it offers new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation. Taken together, the essays in Shakespeare and Judgment offer a genuinely new account of the historical and intellectual coordinates of Shakespeare's plays. Building on current work in legal studies, religious studies, theater history, and critical theory, the volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Key FeaturesProvides the first account of the place of judgment in Shakespearean dramaOffers a fresh perspective on the imaginative relationship between law, religion, and aesthetics in Shakespeare's playsModels new ways of putting the plays' historical and philosophical contexts into conversation.
Download or read book Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners written by Chris Fitter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners is a highly original contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. It breaks important new ground in introducing readers, lay and scholarly alike, to the existence and character of the political culture of the mass of ordinary commoners in Shakespeare's England, as revealed by the recent findings of 'the new social history'. The volume thereby helps to challenge the traditional myths of a non-political commons and a culture of obedience. It also brings together leading Shakespeareans, who digest recent social history, with eminent early modern social historians, who turn their focus on Shakespeare. This genuinely cross-disciplinary approach generates fresh readings of over ten of Shakespeare's plays and locates the impress on Shakespearean drama of popular political thought and pressure in this period of perceived crisis. The volume is unique in engaging and digesting the dramatic importance of the discoveries of the new social history, thereby resituating and revaluing Shakespeare within the social depth of politics.
Download or read book Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama written by James Smith Matthew James Smith and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-22 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the drama of proximity and co-presence in Shakespeare's playsKey FeaturesBrings together the rare pairing of philosophical ethics and performance studies in Shakespeare's playsEngages with the thought of philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Cavell, and Emmanuel LevinasThis book celebrates the theatrical excitement and philosophical meanings of human interaction in Shakespeare. On stage and in life, the face is always window and mirror, representation and presence. It examines the emotional and ethical surplus that appears between faces in the activity and performance of human encounter on stage. By transitioning from face as noun to verb - to face, outface, interface, efface, deface, sur-face - chapters reveal how Shakespeare's plays discover conflict, betrayal and deception as well as love, trust and forgiveness between faces and the bodies that bear them.
Download or read book Circumstantial Shakespeare written by Lorna Hutson and published by Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectu. This book was released on 2015 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement--imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. This view has survived the assaults of various literary theories and has even, surprisingly, been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare's characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. lCircumstantial Shakespeare explodes these venerable critical commonplaces. Drawing on sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (of Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images. 'Circumstances'--which we now think of as incalculable contingencies--were originally topics of forensic inquiry into human intention or passion. In drawing on the Roman forensic tradition of circumstantial proof, Shakespeare did not ignore time and place. His brilliant innovation was to use the topics of circumstance to imply offstage actions, times and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. His plays thus create both their own vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. lCircumstantial Shakespeare offers new readings of lRomeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lucrece, Two Gentlemen of Verona and lMacbeth, as well as new interpretations of Sackville and Norton's lGorboduc and Beaumont and Fletcher's lThe Maid's Tragedy. It engages with eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, Roman forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of modern probability, psychoanalytic criticism and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.
Download or read book The Art of Law in Shakespeare written by Paul Raffield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of five plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield analyses the contiguous development of common law and poetic drama during the first decade of Jacobean rule. The broad premise of The Art of Law in Shakespeare is that the 'artificial reason' of law was a complex art form that shared the same rhetorical strategy as the plays of Shakespeare. Common law and Shakespearean drama of this period employed various aesthetic devices to capture the imagination and the emotional attachment of their respective audiences. Common law of the Jacobean era, as spoken in the law courts, learnt at the Inns of Court and recorded in the law reports, used imagery that would have been familiar to audiences of Shakespeare's plays. In its juridical form, English law was intrinsically dramatic, its adversarial mode of expression being founded on an agonistic model. Conversely, Shakespeare borrowed from the common law some of its most critical themes: justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, community, fairness, and (above all else) humanity. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of the common law, seen through the lens of a specific play by Shakespeare. Topics include the unprecedented significance of rhetorical skills to the practice and learning of common law (Love's Labour's Lost); the early modern treason trial as exemplar of the theatre of law (Macbeth); the art of law as the legitimate distillation of the law of nature (The Winter's Tale); the efforts of common lawyers to create an image of nationhood from both classical and Judeo-Christian mythography (Cymbeline); and the theatrical device of the island as microcosm of the Jacobean state and the project of imperial expansion (The Tempest).
Download or read book Shakespeare s Essays written by Peter G. Platt and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through sustained close-readings of Montaigne's essays and Shakespeare's plays, Platt explores both authors' approaches to self, knowledge and form that stress fractures, interruptions and alternatives.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare s Language written by Lynne Magnusson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminates the pleasures and challenges of Shakespeare's complex language for today's students, teachers, actors and theatre-goers.
