Shakespeare and the Theater of Pity

Shakespeare and the Theater of Pity PDF Author: Shawn Smith
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100082795X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores Shakespeare’s interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience’s most common responses to tragic drama in the theater. For Shakespeare, the word "pity" contained a broader range of meaning than it does in modern English, and was often associated with ideas such as mercy, compassion, charity, pardon, and clemency. This cluster of ideas provides Shakespeare’s characters with a rich range of possibilities for engaging some of humanity’s deepest emotional commitments, in which pity can be seen as a powerful stimulus for fostering social harmony, love, and forgiveness. However, Shakespeare also dramatizes pity’s potential for deception, when the appeal to pity is not genuine, and conceals contrary motives of vengeance and cruelty. As Shakespeare’s works remain relevant for modern audiences and readers, so too does his dramatization of the powerful ways in which emotions such as pity remain essential to our understanding of our shared humanity and of our awareness of compassion’s role in our own private and civic lives.

Shakespeare and the Theater of Pity

Shakespeare and the Theater of Pity PDF Author: Shawn Smith
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100082795X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores Shakespeare’s interest in pity, an emotion that serves as an important catalyst for action within the plays, even as it generates one of the audience’s most common responses to tragic drama in the theater. For Shakespeare, the word "pity" contained a broader range of meaning than it does in modern English, and was often associated with ideas such as mercy, compassion, charity, pardon, and clemency. This cluster of ideas provides Shakespeare’s characters with a rich range of possibilities for engaging some of humanity’s deepest emotional commitments, in which pity can be seen as a powerful stimulus for fostering social harmony, love, and forgiveness. However, Shakespeare also dramatizes pity’s potential for deception, when the appeal to pity is not genuine, and conceals contrary motives of vengeance and cruelty. As Shakespeare’s works remain relevant for modern audiences and readers, so too does his dramatization of the powerful ways in which emotions such as pity remain essential to our understanding of our shared humanity and of our awareness of compassion’s role in our own private and civic lives.

Terror and Pity

Terror and Pity PDF Author: Kirill Ospovat
Publisher: Imperial Encounters in Russian
ISBN: 9781618114723
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Situated on the intersection of comparative literary criticism, political history and theory, and cultural analysis, Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia offers an in-depth reading of early Russian tragedy as a political genre. Imported to Russia by Aleksandr Sumarokov around 1750, tragedy reenacted and shaped the symbolic economy and the often disturbing historical experience of "absolutist" autocracy. Addressing half-forgotten texts and events, this study engages with literary and cultural theory from Walter Benjamin to Foucault and "new historicism" in order to contribute to a broader discussion of early modern "poetics of culture."

Shakespeare's Theater

Shakespeare's Theater PDF Author: Tanya Pollard
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470752963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook brings together in one volume the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater. A collection of the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater. Includes attacks on the stage by moralists, defences by actors and playwrights, letters by magistrates, mayors and aldermen of London, and extracts from legislation. Demonstrates just how heated debates about the theater became in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A general introduction and short prefaces to each piece situate the writers and debates in the literary, social, political and religious history of the time. Brings together in one volume texts that would otherwise be hard to locate. Student-friendly - uses modern spelling and includes vocabulary glosses and annotation.

'Tis Pity She's A Whore

'Tis Pity She's A Whore PDF Author: John Ford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134944489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book Here

Book Description
The last decade has seen a revival of interest in John Ford and especially 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, his tragedy of religious scepticism, incestuous love, and revenge. This text in particular has provided a focus for scholarship as well as being the subject of a number of major theatrical productions. Simon Barker guides the reader through the full range of previous interpretations of the play; moving from an overview of traditional readings he goes on to enlarge upon new questions that have arisen as a consequence of critical and cultural theory.

Shakespeare and the Poet's Life

Shakespeare and the Poet's Life PDF Author: Gary Schmidgall
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813117065
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shakespeare and the Poet's Life explores a central biographical question: why did Shakespeare choose to cease writing sonnets and court-focused long poems like The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis and continue writing plays? Author Gary Schmidgall persuasively demonstrates the value of contemplating the professional reasons Shakespeare -- or any poet of the time -- ceased being an Elizabethan court poet and focused his efforts on drama and the Globe. Students of Shakespeare and of Renaissance poetry will find Schmidgall's approach and conclusions both challenging and illuminating.

The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare

The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231104340
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 538

Get Book Here

Book Description
The quotations are arranged by topic and indexed by character, play, poem, and keyword.

A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France

A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Ronald Schechter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649960X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
In contemporary political discourse, it is common to denounce violent acts as “terroristic.” But this reflexive denunciation is a surprisingly recent development. In A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France, Ronald Schechter tells the story of the term’s evolution in Western thought, examining a neglected yet crucial chapter of our complicated romance with terror. For centuries prior to the French Revolution, the word “terror” had largely positive connotations. Subjects flattered monarchs with the label “terror of his enemies.” Lawyers invoked the “terror of the laws.” Theater critics praised tragedies that imparted terror and pity. By August 1794, however, terror had lost its positive valence. As revolutionaries sought to rid France of its enemies, terror became associated with surveillance committees, tribunals, and the guillotine. By unearthing the tradition that associated terror with justice, magnificence, and health, Schechter helps us understand how the revolutionary call to make terror the order of the day could inspire such fervent loyalty in the first place—even as the gratuitous violence of the revolution eventually transformed it into the dreadful term we would recognize today. Most important, perhaps, Schechter proposes that terror is not an import to Western civilization—as contemporary discourse often suggests—but rather a domestic product with a long and consequential tradition.

Shakespeare's Sister

Shakespeare's Sister PDF Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Tale Blazers
ISBN: 9780789153333
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Virginia Woolf. The third chapter of Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own," based on two lectures the author gave to female students at Cambridge in 1928 on the topic of women and fiction. 36 pages. Tale Blazers.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare PDF Author: Ronald L. Dotterer
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780941664929
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Seventeen critics are represented in this collection of essays designed to illustrate the vitality and range of traditional and new approaches to Shakespeare studies.

Blood on the Stage, 1600 to 1800

Blood on the Stage, 1600 to 1800 PDF Author: Amnon Kabatchnik
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538106167
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 830

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume examines the key representations of transgression drama produced between 1600 and 1800. Arranged in chronological order, the entries consist of plot summary (often including significant dialogue), performance data (if available), opinions by critics and scholars, and other features.