Shakespeare's Christianity

Shakespeare's Christianity PDF Author: E. Beatrice Batson
Publisher: Baylor University Press
ISBN: 1932792368
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores the influences of Catholicism and Protestantism in a trio of Shakespeare's tragedies: Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Bypassing the discussion of Shakespeare's personal religious beliefs, Batson instead focuses on distinct footprints left by Catholic and Protestant traditions that underlie and inform Shakespeare's artistic genius.

Shakespeare's Christianity

Shakespeare's Christianity PDF Author: E. Beatrice Batson
Publisher: Baylor University Press
ISBN: 1932792368
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores the influences of Catholicism and Protestantism in a trio of Shakespeare's tragedies: Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Bypassing the discussion of Shakespeare's personal religious beliefs, Batson instead focuses on distinct footprints left by Catholic and Protestant traditions that underlie and inform Shakespeare's artistic genius.

The Quest for Shakespeare

The Quest for Shakespeare PDF Author: Joseph Pearce
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681495341
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Highly regarded and best-selling literary writer and teacher, Joseph Pearce presents a stimulating and vivid biography of the world's most revered writer that is sure to be controversial. Unabashedly provocative, with scholarship, insight and keen observation, Pearce strives to separate historical fact from fiction about the beloved Bard. Shakespeare is not only one of the greatest figures in human history, he is also one of the most controversial and one of the most elusive. He is famous and yet almost unknown. Who was he? What were his beliefs? Can we really understand his plays and his poetry if we don't know the man who wrote them? These are some of the questions that are asked and answered in this gripping and engaging study of the world's greatest ever poet. The Quest for Shakespeare claims that books about the Bard have got him totally wrong. They misread the man and misread the work. The true Shakespeare has eluded the grasp of the critics. Dealing with the facts of Shakespeare's life and times, Pearce's quest leads to the inescapable conclusion that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic living in very anti-Catholic times. Many of his friends and family were persecuted, and even executed, for their Catholic faith. And yet he seems to have avoided any notable persecution himself. How did he do this? How did he respond to the persecution of his friends and family? What did he say about the dreadful and intolerant times in which he found himself? The Quest for Shakespeare answers these questions in ways that will enlighten and astonish those who love Shakespeare's work, and that will shock and outrage many of his critics. This book is full of surprises for beginner and expert alike.

Through Shakespeare's Eyes

Through Shakespeare's Eyes PDF Author: Joseph Pearce
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1586174134
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pearce analyzes three of Shakespeare's immortal plays in order to uncover evidence of the Bard's Catholic beliefs.

Shakespeare's Catholicism

Shakespeare's Catholicism PDF Author: Sister Maura
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Riverside Press
ISBN:
Category : Catholics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description


Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays

Catholic Theology in Shakespeare's Plays PDF Author: David N. Beauregard
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 0874130026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores and reexamines Shakespeare's theology from the standpoint of revisionist history of the English Reformation.

Shakespeare on Love

Shakespeare on Love PDF Author: Joseph Pearce
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681494337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Get Book Here

Book Description
Having given the evidence for William Shakespeare's Catholicism in two previous books, literary biographer Joseph Pearce turns his attention in this work to the Bard's most famous play, Romeo and Juliet. "Star-crossed" Romeo and Juliet are Shakespeare's most famous lovers and perhaps the most well-known lovers in literary history. Though the young pair has been held up as a romantic ideal, the play is a tragedy, ending in death. What then, asks Pearce, is Shakespeare saying about his protagonists? Are they the hapless victims of fate, or are they partly to blame for their deaths? Is their love the "real thing", or is it self-indulgent passion? And what about the adults in their lives? Did they give the young people the example and guidance that they needed? The Catholic understanding of sexual desire, and its need to be ruled by reason, is on display in Romeo and Juliet, argues Pearce. The play is not a paean to romance but a cautionary tale about the naïveté and folly of youthful infatuation and the disastrous consequences of poor parenting. The well-known characters and their oft-quoted lines are rich in symbolic meaning that points us in the direction of the age-old wisdom of the Church. Although such a reading of Romeo and Juliet is countercultural in an age that glorifies the heedless and headless heart of young love, Pearce makes his case through a meticulous engagement with Shakespeare and his age and with the text of the play itself.

A Will to Believe

A Will to Believe PDF Author: David Scott Kastan
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191004294
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
On 19 December 1601, John Croke, then Speaker of the House of Commons, addressed his colleagues: "If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion." But if religion was recognized as the "chief thing in a Commonwealth," we have been less certain what it does in Shakespeare's plays. Written and performed in a culture in which religion was indeed inescapable, the plays have usually been seen either as evidence of Shakespeare's own disinterested secularism or, more recently, as coded signposts to his own sectarian commitments. Based upon the inaugural series of the Oxford-Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2008, A Will to Believe offers a thoughtful, surprising, and often moving consideration of how religion actually functions in them: not as keys to Shakespeare's own faith but as remarkably sensitive registers of the various ways in which religion charged the world in which he lived. The book shows what we know and can't know about Shakespeare's own beliefs, and demonstrates, in a series of wonderfully alert and agile readings, how the often fraught and vertiginous religious environment of Post-Reformation England gets refracted by the lens of Shakespeare's imagination.

The Catholic Shakespeare?

The Catholic Shakespeare? PDF Author: The Portsmouth Institute
Publisher: Sheed & Ward
ISBN: 1580512763
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
Was Shakespeare Catholic? By observing Shakespeare’s history and his plays evidence suggests that he was sympathetic to the Catholics’ plight. He had personal connections to people who were persecuted for their faith and throughout his plays there is evidence of a Catholic worldview. The Catholic Shakespeare? gives an inside look at the 2011 Portsmouth Institute conference, offering different takes from speakers to Shakespearean plays. Each speaker offers compelling evidence and some suggestions about the basis and meaning behind his plays as they relate to a Catholic view. Dr. Gerard Kilroy, University College, London, assembles linguistic and thematic cues to suggest Romeo and Juliet as an allegory for believers and the Catholic Church. Dennis Taylor, Boston College, takes a more historical approach in his review of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, tracing Catholic links to early efforts to explore the Americas. And, finally, Fr. David Beauregard, St. Clement seminary, takes a religious and philosophical look at relationships, charity, and the development of virtue in The Tempest. The Catholic Shakespeare is a must-read for anyone interested in the mystery behind Shakespeare’s religion.

Religion Around Shakespeare

Religion Around Shakespeare PDF Author: Peter Iver Kaufman
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271069589
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his plays.

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages

Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages PDF Author: Alfred Thomas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319902180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.