Author: Alexander Leggatt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521779425
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.
Author: Emma Smith
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470776919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
This Guide introduces students to critical writing on Shakespeare’s comedies over the last four centuries. 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.
Author: Penny Gay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139469770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
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.
Author: Larry S. Champion
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674271418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
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.
Author: Kiernan Ryan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137075104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book one of the most original and compelling voices in contemporary Shakespeare criticism undertakes a detailed study of the ten extraordinary comedies Shakespeare wrote during his first decade as a dramatist: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Through close readings of these plays Kiernan Ryan reveals Shakespeare's deepening disenchantment with his world and his dream of that world transfigured. Ryan engages with each comedy as a unique work of dramatic and poetic art, with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, paying special attention to its language and form. As the haunting vision shared by the plays emerges from Ryan's acute analysis of each of them, the book transforms our understanding and appreciation of Shakespearean comedy. Written in a lively, accessible style, Shakespeare's Comedies is essential reading not only for students and teachers, but also for anyone keen to consider these plays from a fresh perspective.
Author: Sarbani Putatunda
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist
ISBN: 9788126906840
Category : English drama (Comedy)
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
According To The Social Historians Of England, After The Economic And Religious Unrest Of The Middle Tudor Period, The Freedom Preached By The Humanists Rejuvenated In A Way The Moral Of The Entire Nation. And Shakespeare Having Chanced Upon The Best Time In Which To Live Had Ample Opportunity To Exercise, With Least Distraction And Most Encouragement, The Highest Faculties Of Man. His Comedies, Therefore, Register Most Comprehensively The Characteristics Of The Congenial Social Atmosphere Of His Time. The Saturnalia Presented In His Comedies Are Not Inimical To The Positive Aspects Of A New Bourgeois Social Set-Up, Which Facilitated The Notions Of Peace And Order. But Inside The Large England, Which Still Retained The Remnants Of Monarchy And/Or Aristocracy, Society Was Afflicted By Many Discordant Elements, Which Shakespeare Never Failed To Notice And Record. As An Assiduous Comic Playwright, He Infused In His Saturnalia The Hints Of Many Social Injustices, The Oppressive Patriarchy (Egeon And His Diktats Against His Daughter For Daring To Choose Her Own Husband In A Midsummer Night S Dream), The Crisis Of Aristocracy (Sir Toby And His Likes), The Degeneration Of Moral Values Leading To An Erosion Of Social Values In A Mercantile Society, And The Historical Retrospection Of The Turbulent Past.The Infusion Though Pronounced In His Early Comedies Is Not Entirely Absent In The Middle Comedies, Which Contain Elements Of Social Realism Behind A Romantic Exterior. The Audience Would Naturally Realize That Both The Early And The Middle Comedies Of Shakespeare Were Interlinked In The Context Of The Social Realism Of The Elizabethan Period. The Delicate Relationship Of Oberon And Titania In A Midsummer Night S Dream, For Instance, Represent A Different Version Of Matrimony Throughout Causing The Reader To Question The Validity Of The Institution. Likewise In The Taming Of The Shrew One Is At A Loss At The End Of The Play When Kate Appears To Be More Subservient Than Either Her Sister Or The Widow. Has Marriage Actually Tamed Her Or Has She Relinquished Her Past Misdemeanours Willingly Because She Has Fallen In Love With Petruchio? The World In Twelfth Night Is Also Clearly Demarcated Into Two Classes The Landowning Wealthy Aristocrats And The Titular Aristocrats Whom Lawrence Classifies As The Declassed Aristocrats . The Historical Retrospection Of The Past Is Made Clearer At This Apparently Incongruent Point, Than In All Other Romantic Comedies. The Book Would Definitely Prove Valuable To Students And Teachers Concerned With Shakespearean Works.
Author: Patrick Swinden
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349017515
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
Author: Bart Van Es
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198723350
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
In this Very Short Introduction Bart Van Es analyses Shakespeare's comedic plays, picking out the family resemblances across these works. He considers their shared themes such as confusion and cross dressing, misguided love, twins and substitutions, and explores the bard's verbal artistry and wit.
Author: Michael Mangan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317895045
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.
Author: Alexander Leggatt
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487586345
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This is the first book to survey comprehensively the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean citizen comedy. Most studies of the period focus on major authors; this one follows recurring themes and motifs, through a variety of plays by many authors from the moralizing comedies of the boys' companies. Professor Leggatt provides not only a fresh perspective on familiar plays by such figures as Jonson, Middleton, and Dekker, but also a new look at a number of neglected comedies, some by unfamiliar authors, some by major authors working together. Standard figures – the usurer, the prodigal, and the prostitute – and standard plots – notably intrigues based on money or sex (or both) – are traced to show the changes that occur in apparently stereotyped material at the hands of individual authors. The result is to display the range and internal variety of a genre that too often is seen as all of a piece, and to show the different ways in which social thinking can interact with the demands and comic form. This book will interest students of Renaissance English drama, both for its treatment of a neglected type of play and for its comments on individual citizen comedies. Those who are concerned with drama as a vehicle for social commentary will find many points for discussion.
