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Author: Paula Blank
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726854
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Shakespeare's poems and plays are rich in reference to "measure, number, and weight," which were the key terms of an early modern empirical and quantitative imagination. Shakespeare's investigation of Renaissance measures of reality centers on the consequences of applying principles of measurement to the appraisal of human value. This is especially true of efforts to judge people as better or worse than, or equal to, one another. With special attention to the Sonnets, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet, Paula Blank argues that Shakespeare, in his experiments with measurement, demonstrates the incommensurability of the aims and operations of quantification with human experience.From scales and spans to squares and levels to ratings and rules, Shakespeare's rhetoric of measurement reveals the extent to which language in the Renaissance was itself understood as a set of alternative measures for figuring human worth. In chapters that explore attempts to measure human feeling, weigh human equalities (and inequalities), regulate race relations, and deduce social and economic merit, Blank shows why Shakespeare's measures are so often exposed as "mismeasures"—equivocal, provisional, and as unreliable as the men and women they are designed to assess.
Author: Paula Blank
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726854
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Shakespeare's poems and plays are rich in reference to "measure, number, and weight," which were the key terms of an early modern empirical and quantitative imagination. Shakespeare's investigation of Renaissance measures of reality centers on the consequences of applying principles of measurement to the appraisal of human value. This is especially true of efforts to judge people as better or worse than, or equal to, one another. With special attention to the Sonnets, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet, Paula Blank argues that Shakespeare, in his experiments with measurement, demonstrates the incommensurability of the aims and operations of quantification with human experience.From scales and spans to squares and levels to ratings and rules, Shakespeare's rhetoric of measurement reveals the extent to which language in the Renaissance was itself understood as a set of alternative measures for figuring human worth. In chapters that explore attempts to measure human feeling, weigh human equalities (and inequalities), regulate race relations, and deduce social and economic merit, Blank shows why Shakespeare's measures are so often exposed as "mismeasures"—equivocal, provisional, and as unreliable as the men and women they are designed to assess.
Author: Peter G. Platt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317056523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.
Author: Tiffany Werth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351963430
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.
Author: Dr Tiffany Jo Werth
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472468503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
What makes Shakespeare centrally 'exceptional' to the current humanities curriculum, a measure and minimum unit for University administrations and the general public to recognise the activity of 'the humanities'? The contributing authors of essays in this issue of the Yearbook ask how we might push this question beyond familiar categories of the exceptional, the superlative, the above, beyond, below, or even the normative and familiar, in order to scale Shakespeare historically, canonically, and ontologically in relation to 'the human'. Each essay offers a case study devoted to Shakespeare's attentiveness to or implications for a specific location along the scala naturae -- from the wind of the coelum down to the stony lapis. Attending to locations such as these offers to displace 'the human' to a periphery, to but one among the jostling forces of life. Yet, as a centripetal figure of our culture, even of world culture, Shakespeare proves hard to displace, being engrained so deeply in our sense. Essays in the volume take up the challenge of evaluating Shakespeare’s intimate involvement with our understandings of what is or makes 'the human'. In the now-established tradition of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, the 15th issue surveys important developments and topics of concern in contemporary Shakespeare studies.
Author: Patricia Parker
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249747
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Providing innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives on Shakespeare's plays, Patricia Parker offers a series of dazzling readings that demonstrate how easy-to-overlook textual or semantic details reverberate within and beyond the Shakespearean text, and suggest that the boundary between language and context is an incontinent divide.
Author: A. Cohen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230619584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Cohen utilizes the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary literary and cultural studies to shed new light on the relationships between technologies and the people who used them during the early modern period.
Author: Sujata Iyengar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472557506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
Physicians, readers and scholars have long been fascinated by Shakespeare's medical language and the presence of healers, wise women and surgeons in his work. This dictionary includes entries about ailments, medical concepts, cures and, taking into account recent critical work on the early modern body, bodily functions, parts, and pathologies in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Medical Language will provide a comprehensive guide for those needing to understand specific references in the plays, in particular, archaic diagnoses or therapies ('choleric', 'tub-fast') and words that have changed their meanings ('phlegmatic', 'urinal'); those who want to learn more about early modern medical concepts ('elements', 'humors'); and those who might have questions about the embodied experience of living in Shakespeare's England. Entries reveal what terms and concepts might mean in the context of Shakespeare's plays, and the significance that a particular disease, body part or function has in individual plays and the Shakespearean corpus at large.
Author: Chahra Beloufa
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040016537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
Speech Act Theory and Shakespeare delves deeper than linguistic ornamentation to illuminate the complex dynamics of thanking as a significant speech act in Shakespearean plays. The word “thanks” appears nearly 400 times in 37 Shakespearean plays, calling for a careful investigation of its veracity as a speech act in the 16th-century setting. This volume combines linguistic analysis to explore the various uses of thanks, focusing on key thanking scenes across a spectrum of plays, including All’s Well That Ends Well, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, The Winter’s Tale, and the Henriad. Shakespeare’s works indicate the act of thanking to be more than a normal part of dialogue; it is an artistic expression fraught with pitfalls similar to those of negative speech acts. The study aims to determine what compels the characters in Shakespeare to offer thanks and evaluates Shakespeare’s accomplishment in imbuing the word “thanks” with performance quality in the theatrical sphere. This work adds to our comprehension of Shakespearean plays and larger conversations on the challenges of language usage in theatrical and cultural settings by examining the convergence of gratitude with power dynamics, political intrigue, and interpersonal relationships, drawing on a multidisciplinary approach that includes pragmatics, philosophy, religion, and psychology.
Author: Robert Stagg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192863274
Category : Blank verse, English
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History is a study both of Shakespeare's versification and of its place in the history of early modern blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). It ranges from the continental precursors of English blank verse in the early sixteenth century through thedrama and poetry of Shakespeare's contemporaries to the editing of blank verse in the eighteenth century and beyond.Alternative in its argumentation as well as its arguments, Shakespeare's Blank Verse tries out fresh ways of thinking about meter--by shunning doctrinaire methods of apprehending a writer's versification, and by reconnecting meter to the fundamental literary, dramatic, historical, and socialquestions that animate Shakespeare's drama.
Author: Jonathan P. Lamb
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107193311
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
This book explores the words, forms, and styles Shakespeare used to interact with the verbal marketplace of early modern England.
