Shakespeare's Problem Plays

Shakespeare's Problem Plays PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Sta
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Comedy and Tragedy--Collected here in one binding are All's Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure and The History of Troilus and Cressida. Collectively they are known as Shakespeare's Problem Plays. While the first two are usually placed with the comedies and the later with the tragedies none of them fit neatly into either classification. Their structure subject matter and resolutions create problems for those who want simple classifications. The term was coined by critic F. S. Boas who believed that these plays each explored a moral dilemma and social problem through their main characters giving the term a layered meaning. O it is excellentTo have a giant's strength;But it is tyrannousTo use it like a giant.

Shakespeare's Problem Plays

Shakespeare's Problem Plays PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Sta
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Comedy and Tragedy--Collected here in one binding are All's Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure and The History of Troilus and Cressida. Collectively they are known as Shakespeare's Problem Plays. While the first two are usually placed with the comedies and the later with the tragedies none of them fit neatly into either classification. Their structure subject matter and resolutions create problems for those who want simple classifications. The term was coined by critic F. S. Boas who believed that these plays each explored a moral dilemma and social problem through their main characters giving the term a layered meaning. O it is excellentTo have a giant's strength;But it is tyrannousTo use it like a giant.

Shakespeare's Problem Plays

Shakespeare's Problem Plays PDF Author: Eustace M. W. Tillyard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140175776
Category : Tragicomedy
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure - these are all described by the author as Shakespeare's problem plays. In each of them, the author argues, Shakespeare is deeply interested in speculative thought and in the observance of human nature for their own sake; and each is concerned with men on the edge of manhood and of the harsh experiences which forced them to grow up.

Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography

Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography PDF Author: Diana Price
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
It successfully argues that "William Shakespeare" was the pen name of an aristocrat, and that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was a shrewd entrepreneur, not a dramatist."--BOOK JACKET.

The Moral Universe of Shakespeare's Problem Plays

The Moral Universe of Shakespeare's Problem Plays PDF Author: Vivian Thomas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100035010X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
What is it that makes Shakespeare’s problem plays problematic? Many critics have sought for the underlying vision or message of these puzzling and disturbing dramas. Originally published in 1987, the key to Viv Thomas’s new synthesis of the plays is the idea of fracture and dissolution in the universe. From the collapse of ‘degree’ in Troilus and Cressida to the corruption at the heart of innocence in Measure for Measure, to the puzzling status of virtue and valour in All’s Well, the most obvious feature of these plays in their capacity to prompt new questions. In a detailed discussion of each play in turn, the author traces the dominant themes that both distinguish and unite them, and provides numerous insights into the sources, background, texture and morality of the plays.

Is There a Shakespeare Problem?

Is There a Shakespeare Problem? PDF Author: Sir Granville George Greenwood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description


Gender and Performance in Shakespeare's Problem Comedies

Gender and Performance in Shakespeare's Problem Comedies PDF Author: David F. McCandless
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253113344
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
"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.

Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation

Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation PDF Author: Margaret Jane Kidnie
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415308674
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Kidnie brings current debates in performance criticism in contact with recent developments in textual studies to explore what it is that distinguishes Shakespearean work from its apparent other, the adaptation.

Shakespeare and the Problem Play

Shakespeare and the Problem Play PDF Author: E.L. Risden
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078647243X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Shakespeare's plays provide a rich source of genre variation as well as moral or ethical issues that invite deep study. The genre issue often proves the very moral crux where Shakespeare raises the most complex questions. He aimed to build good plays, not simple fulfillments of genre demands. To him "good plays" meant leaving his audience with problems to consider. This book begins with those works most commonly appearing in studies of problem plays, The Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure; moves to some comedic problem plays, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night; and then to tragic problem plays, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. It concludes with some problems in the history and romance genres for the issues they raise in love, adventure, and governance: Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and Love's Labor's Lost.

Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning

Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning PDF Author: Norman Rabkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226701786
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
"Rabkin selects The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Richard III, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest as the plays on which to build his argument, and he teaches us a great deal about these plays. . . . To convince the unbelievingthat that the plays do mean, but that the meaning is coterminous with the experience of the plays themselves, Rabkin finds a strategy more subtle than thesis and rational argument, a strategy designed to make us see for ourselves why thematic descriptions are inadequate, see for ourselves tath the plays mean more than and statement about them can ever suggest." –Barbara A. Mowat, Auburn University "Norman Rabkin's new book is a very different kind of good book. Elegantly spare, sharp, undogmatic. . . . The relationship between the perception of unity and the perception of artistic achievement is a basic conundrum, and it is one that Mr. Rabkin has courageously placed at the center of his discussion." –G. K. Hunter, Sewanee Review "Rabkin's book is brilliant, taut, concise, beautifully argued, and sensitively responsive to the individuality of particular Shakespeare plays." –Anne Barton, New York Review of Books

Shakespeare and His Authors

Shakespeare and His Authors PDF Author: William Leahy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441148361
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
The Shakespeare Authorship question - the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays and who the man we know as Shakespeare was - is a subject which fascinates millions of people the world over and can be seen as a major cultural phenomenon. However, much discussion of the question exists on the very margins of academia, deemed by most Shakespearean academics as unimportant or, indeed, of interest only to conspiracy theorists. Yet, many academics find the Authorship question interesting and worthy of analysis in theoretical and philosophical terms. This collection brings together leading literary and cultural critics to explore the Authorship question as a social, cultural and even theological phenomenon and consider it in all its rich diversity and significance.