Author: Graham Holderness
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312227135
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Graham Holderness provides a new treatment of Shakespeare's historical dramas by reviewing past sources in light of modern theory, thus redefining the world about which Shakespeare wrote. He begins with the social and cultural context in which these "historical" plays of chivalric antiquity and masculine virtue were written and suggests that the world depicted in the plays represented a male-dominated aristocracy preoccupied with war and violence. The book reveals antiquity's contradictions in all their glamour and glory, their absurdities and arrogance, and provides alternative contexts for reading Shakespeare's history plays.
Author: Larry S. Champion
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033846X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Larry S. Champion examines Shakespeare's English history plays and describes the structural devices through which Shakespeare controls the audience's angle of vision and its response to the pattern of historical events. Champion observes the experimentation between stage worlds and the significance of a dramatic technique unique to the history play—one that combines the detachment of a documentary necessary for a broad intellectual view of history and the simultaneous engagement between character and spectator. Champion sees a conscious bifurcation occurring in Shakespeare's dramaturgy after Richard II. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare continues to focus on the psychological analysis and internalized protagonist which lead to his major tragic achievements. In King John and Henry IV, the playwright develops a middle ground between the polarities of Henry VI, in which the flat, onedimensional characters essentially serve the purposes of the narrative, and the tragedies, in which the spectator's consuming interest is in the developing centralfigure whose critical moments they share. Champion sees Henry V as the culmination of Shakespeare's e fforts in the English history play.
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 682
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Author: Jonathan Baldo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136497684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
A distinguishing feature of Shakespeare’s later histories is the prominent role he assigns to the need to forget. This book explore the ways in which Shakespeare expanded the role of forgetting in histories from King John to Henry V, as England contended with what were perceived to be traumatic breaks in its history and in the fashioning of a sense of nationhood. For plays ostensibly designed to recover the past and make it available to the present, they devote remarkable attention to the ways in which states and individuals alike passively neglect or actively suppress the past and rewrite history. Two broad and related historical developments caused remembering and forgetting to occupy increasingly prominent and equivocal positions in Shakespeare’s history plays: an emergent nationalism and the Protestant Reformation. A growth in England’s sense of national identity, constructed largely in opposition to international Catholicism, caused historical memory to appear a threat as well as a support to the sense of unity. The Reformation caused many Elizabethans to experience a rupture between their present and their Catholic past, a condition that is reflected repeatedly in the history plays, where the desire to forget becomes implicated with traumatic loss. Both of these historical shifts resulted in considerable fluidity and uncertainty in the values attached to historical memory and forgetting. Shakespeare’s histories, in short, become increasingly equivocal about the value of their own acts of recovery and recollection.
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1466884363
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 987
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Book Description
It is part of Shakespeare's extraordinary contribution to our culture that, through his dramas based on English history, he played a unique part in forming our view of ourselves and our nationhood. From King John, in which through Magna Carta the king's absolute power was first limited and the people's freedoms assured, to--almost in his own lifetime--Henry VIII, Shakespeare wrote a series of ten plays portraying the course of history. It represents almost one third of his entire dramatic output. The overarching theme of these plays is the vital importance of the sovereign's legitimacy if the nation is to be stable. They cover revolutionary times and events--the deposition and murder of Richard II, the Wars of the Roses, the usurping of the throne by Richard III--but they always affirm the principle that a legitimate king, circumscribed by an agreed constituion, is the only proper guarantee of the nation's liberties. There are many other ways in which Shakespeare's patriotism has become definitive. In Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech to the troops before Agincourt, for example, or John of gaunt's 'scepter'd isle' speech, a sense of Englishness is expressed which still lives in English minds today. The E;izabethan's pride in nationhood was perfectly embodied by Shakespeare, but the poetry of it transcends its own time. In this edition the history plays are brought together with a large group of illustrations which echo and amplify their themes. Gloriously vivid images of England's story are presented here, putting the great plays in a magnificent setting.
Author: Peter Davison
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141961414
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 707
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Book Description
The volume contains Richard II, Henry IV Part One, henry IV Part Two, and Henry V. Each play possesses its own distinctive mood, tone and style, and together they inhabit the turbulent period of change from the usurpation of the throne of Richard II by Bolingbroke to the triumph of heroic kingship in Henry V.
Author: Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683932552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
Like a King: Casting Shakespeare’s Histories for Citizens and Subjects is a dual examination of Shakespeare’s history plays in their early modern production contexts and of the ways the histories can speak directly to twenty-first-century American political and social concerns. Author and production director Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy examines how strategic doubled and re-gendered casting can animate the underlying questions of Richard II, Henry V, and King John in vital and immediate ways for American audiences. Examining evidence from both the archive and the rehearsal room, Gutierrez-Dennehy explores the texts as repositories for dialogues about power, gender, identity, nationhood, and leadership. With the American political system as its backdrop, Like a King argues that productions of Shakespeare’s histories can interrogate and explore the relationships between citizens, subjects, and their leaders.
Author: Jean E. Howard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134946155
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Engendering a Nation adopts a sophisticated feminist analysis to examine the place of gender in contesting representations of nationhood in early modern England. Plays featured include: * King John * Henry VI, Part I * Henry VI, Part II * Henry, Part III * Richard III * Richard II * Henry V. It will be a must for students and scholars interested in the cultural and social implications of Shakespeare today.
Author: Lily Bess Campbell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Historiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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