Download or read book Is conscience but a word that cowards use An analysis of conscience in William Shakespeare s Richard III and Hamlet written by Imke Fischer and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2017-10-12 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bachelor Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,1, University of Göttingen, language: English, abstract: In the famous title quote from Richard III, William Shakespeare has his protagonist disregard the concept of conscience as a mere ,word‘, an invention of no further consequence to a brave person. Meanwhile Hamlet complains that “conscience does make cowards of us all“ and thereby infers a strong significance of conscience to mankind. These popular, though seemingly contradictory statements raise the question just what exact understanding of said moral concept Shakespeare wanted to relay to his audience. What was conscience to him, his audience and his contemporary writers? Was conscience seen as ,but a word‘, a cowardly excuse for inaction or as an innate concept dwelling in every man? What were the underlying principles of his set of moral values? Both the author and his contemporaries had an interest towards both the specific moral phenomenon of conscience and the intricacies of the human persona and its inner moral values. In the two plays at hand, Richard III and Hamlet, conscience is displayed as an innate concept. In their beliefs towards this concept, heroes and villains do not contradict, but complement each other. All relevant scenes from the two plays taken together exhibit a comprehensive image of the discourse of conscience in the Elizabethan Age. It ranges from personified character and externality to an inner contemplation with God and man‘s own soul, from an exhilarating righteous feeling to purgatory-like torment on Earth. It shows a broad understanding of the term, much more extensive than our modern perception of it, which has narrowed down to the single meaning of discernment between good and evil. Nevertheless, conscience stands in a long tradition of philosophical debates and Shakespeare adds his own touch to it with Richard III. and Hamlet, leaving modern eyes with a better appreciation of concept of conscience.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment written by Valerie Traub and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.
Download or read book Let Your Conscience be Your Guide written by Phillip Aijian and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This master's thesis investigates William Shakespeare's development and treatment of the conscience in his plays Richard, Duke of York and Richard III. This study and investigation derive from a point of academic contention with claims made in Sandra Bonetto's essay "Coward Conscience and Bad Conscience in Shakespeare and Nietzsche." This thesis investigates the influence of theological studies, political philosophy, dramatic trends, and post Reformation discourse between the Catholic and Protestant churches which helped shape Shakespeare's perception of the conscience at the time of his writing. This thesis attempts to arrive at conclusions by looking at the works of figures like theologian John Calvin, political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, playwright Christopher Marlowe, and Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, among others. Though these authors assume critical points in the discussion of conscience, but their work cannot be regarded as conclusive by any means. The discussion of conscience engages incredibly diverse fields of thought and had done so for hundreds of years. In examining Shakespeare's development of the conscience, this thesis also engages with what writers from Nietzsche to Bonetto have, in various terms, identified as Shakepeare's "dialectical impulse." Shakespeare's investigation of the conscience resists easy answers and moralizing. Rather, his drama juxtaposes and amplifies characters and ideas, placing them in dialogue with each other so that the reader or audience member discovers an occasion to enter critically into the dialogue.
Download or read book On Shakespeare in Sonnets written by E. L. Risden and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader Response Theory began to take hold in the 1960s. Much like the phenomenological approach to criticism that preceded it, it allows both reader and author intentionality and conscious presence, and it gives the reader particular presence in the fulfillment or completion of the text. The work of art mediates between author and reader, and the reader participates in an interpretive community that gives the work life and liveliness. This book is divided into three sections: Part I discusses the history and practice of Reader Response criticism; Part II comprises a collection of thirty-eight sonnets responding both critically and creatively to Shakespeare’s works; and Part III discusses the poems of Part II as both creative and critical acts, elaborating on what they aim to show about the plays and how Shakespeare’s plays continue to encourage varied analytical and personal response. As shown here, the creative and the critical need not be separate, exclusive acts; each invades the other.
Download or read book Shakespeare s histories and counter histories written by Dermot Cavanagh and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's history plays have always been pivotal to our understanding of his works. This collection renews attention to these crucial plays by exploring official and unofficial versions of the past, histories and counter-histories in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By exploring the diversity of Shakespeare’s engagement with history in all its forms, these contributors open up a range of new interpretive possibilities for understanding the way history ‘plays’ with the past. The book is divided into three sections: Memory and mourning, Counter-histories, Identity and performance. In each section, leading theorists, historicists and performance critics offer fresh perspectives on the key issues that are transforming our understanding of Shakespeare. These include: gender and violence, the mapping of Britain, cultural memory and religion. This collection will appeal to all critically engaged readers of Shakespeare. In particular it will command wide-ranging interest from undergraduates, postgraduates, academic researchers and students of early modern theatre, history and culture.
Download or read book Bold Conscience written by Joshua R. Held and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023-06-13 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "'Bold Conscience' chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint--what the author labels "cowardly conscience"--to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. Caught at the vortex of public and private concerns, the concept of the conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders on down to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the consequent regicide of King Charles I. Yet within this mix of perspectives, the most sinuous, complex, and ultimately lasting perspectives on bold conscience emerge from deliberately literary, rhetorically artistic voices--Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors, in re-casting the idea of conscience as a private, interior, shameful state to one of boldness fit for the public realm, parallel a historical development in which the conscience becomes a platform both for royal power and for common dissent in post-Reformation England. With the 1649 regicide of King Charles I as a fulcrum that unites both literary and historical timelines, Held tracks the increasing power of the conscience from William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Henry VIII to John Donne's court sermons, and finally to Milton's Areopagitica and Charles's defense of his kingship, Eikon Basilike. In a direct attack on Eikon Basilike, Milton destroys the prerogative of the royal conscience in Eikonoklastes, and later in Paradise Lost proposes an alternative basis for inner confidence, rooting it not in divine right but in the 'paradise within,' a metonym for conscience. Applying a fine-grain literary analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study looks backward as well to the theological foundations of the concept in Luther of the 1520s and forward to its transformation by Locke into the term 'consciousness' in 1689. Ultimately, Held's study shows how the idea of a conscience in early modern England, long central to the private self and linked to the will, memory, and mind-emerges as a nexus between the private self and the realm of public action, a bulwark against absolute sovereignty, and its attenuation as a means of more limited, personal certainty. Whether in Milton's struggle against King Charles or Hamlet's against King Claudius, the conscience born of the Reformation becomes less a state of inner critique and more a form of outward expression fit for the communal life and commitments demanded by the early modern era"--
Download or read book Hamlet After Q1 written by Zachary Lesser and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a badly bound volume of twelve Shakespeare plays in a closet of his manor house. Nearly all of the plays were first editions, but one stood out as extraordinary: a previously unknown text of Hamlet that predated all other versions. Suddenly, the world had to grapple with a radically new—or rather, old—Hamlet in which the characters, plot, and poetry of Shakespeare's most famous play were profoundly and strangely transformed. Q1, as the text is known, has been declared a rough draft, a shorthand piracy, a memorial reconstruction, and a pre-Shakespearean "ur-Hamlet," among other things. Flickering between two historical moments—its publication in Shakespeare's early seventeenth century and its rediscovery in Bunbury's early nineteenth—Q1 is both the first and last Hamlet. Because this text became widely known only after the familiar version of the play had reached the pinnacle of English literature, its reception has entirely depended on this uncanny temporal oscillation; so too has its ongoing influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of the play. Zachary Lesser examines how the improbable discovery of Q1 has forced readers to reconsider accepted truths about Shakespeare as an author and about the nature of Shakespeare's texts. In telling the story of this mysterious quarto and tracing the debates in newspapers, London theaters, and scholarly journals that followed its discovery, Lesser offers brilliant new insights on what we think we mean when we talk about Hamlet.
Download or read book Everybody s Shakespeare written by Maynard Mack and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everybody’s Shakespeare brings the insights and wisdom of one of the finest Shakespearean scholars of our century to the task of surveying why the Bard continues to flourish in modern times. Mack treats individually seven plays—Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Cesar, and Antony and Cleopatra—and demonstrates in each case how the play has retained its vitality, complexity, and appeal.
Download or read book Higher conscience is heroic lower conscience cowardly written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and published by Philaletheians UK. This book was released on 2022-02-23 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral strength, or freedom from selfish passions, is the virtue of individuals; security is the virtue of a state. Higher Conscience is that instantaneous perception between right and wrong. She tells us that we ought to do right, but she does not tell us what right is. But Love’s way of dealing with us is different from conscience’s way. Conscience commands; Love inspires! Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities; it is merely personal opinions and judgment. Conviction is the conscience of the lower mind. Wild liberty develops iron conscience, but want of liberty stupefies conscience. Conscience is but a word that cowards use. O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! Remorse is the whisper of the soul. Pangs of conscience are the sadistic stirrings of Christianity. Only a quiet conscience makes one so serene! The bite of conscience, like a dog biting a stone, is stupidity.
Download or read book The Works of William Shakespeare Hamlet King Henry VIII Pericles Poems written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1890 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Coward Conscience written by Frederick William Robinson and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shakespeare and Trump written by Jeffrey R. Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the modernity of Shakespeare's politics, and the theatricality of Trump's
Download or read book The Times Book of Quotations written by and published by HarperCollins (UK). This book was released on 2000 with total page 808 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects quotes by individuals from Hank Aaron to Emile Zola covering subjects including cats, intelligence, envy, Switzerland, and prophecy.
Download or read book The Complete Works written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 1522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shakespeare in Theory and Practice written by Catherine Belsey and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these essays, collected here for the first time, renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, she demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades, while a new introduction offers a narrative and analytical overview, from a participant's perspective, of some of its key implications. Written with verve and conviction, this book shows how texts can offer access to the dissonances of the past when theory finds an outcome in practice.
Download or read book The Idea of Conscience in Richard III and Macbeth written by John S. Wilks and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book King Richard III written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
