Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy PDF Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691149526
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. "I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy PDF Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691149526
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book

Book Description
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. "I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy PDF Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400839858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. "I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy PDF Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber
Publisher: Princeton, N.J : Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
" I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction

Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare's Festive World

Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare's Festive World PDF Author: Phebe Jensen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521506395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A study of the relationship between traditional festive pastimes, including Midsummer pageants and dancing, and Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

Shakespeare's Festive Comedy PDF Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


A Midsummer-night's Dream

A Midsummer-night's Dream PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Athens (Greece)
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description


Shakespeare's Festive World

Shakespeare's Festive World PDF Author: Frangois Laroque
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521457866
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This book offers an exciting new perspective on Shakespeare's relation to popular culture.

A Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s Comedies

A Marxist Study of Shakespeare’s Comedies PDF Author: Elliot Krieger
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 134904654X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description


Shakespeare's "rough Magic"

Shakespeare's Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber
Publisher: Newark : University of Delaware Press ; London : Associated University Presses
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description


Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths

Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths PDF Author: Camille Wells Slights
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802029249
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Challenging the traditional view that Shakespeare's early comedies are about the experience of romantic love and constitute a genre called romantic comedy, Camille Wells Slights demonstrates that they dramatize individual action in the context of social dynamics, reflecting and commenting on the culture in which they originated. Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths sheds new light on ten Shakespearean comedies: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In a diversity of comic forms - from rollicking farce to tragicomedy - these plays offer varying perspectives on the forces that make and mar human communities. Dramatizing tensions between savagery and civilization, autonomy and dependence, and isolation and community, Shakespeare's comedies both reflect and comment on the society that produces them. Slights eschews viewing these comedies as endorsements of the prevailing ideologies of sixteenth-century England or as subversions of that hierarchical, patriarchal culture. They can be most fruitfully understood as imaginative forms that present cultural practices, institutions and beliefs as human constructions susceptible to critical scrutiny. While exposing the injustice and brutality as well as the assurances and satisfactions of social experiences, Shakespeare's comedies represent people as inescapably social beings. By combining historical scholarship with formal analysis and incorporating insights from social anthropology and feminist theory, Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths offers new readings of Shakespeare's early comedies and analyses the interaction between the plays and the social structures and processes of early modern England.