Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories

Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories PDF 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.

Shakespeare: The Histories

Shakespeare: The Histories PDF 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.

Shakespeare's Histories

Shakespeare's Histories PDF Author: Emma Smith
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470776889
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This Guide steers students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s history plays, enhancing their enjoyment and broadening their critical repertoire. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare’s history plays. Covers both significant early views and recent critical interventions. Substantial editorial material links the articles and places them in context. Annotated suggestions for further reading allow students to investigate further.

Shakespeare's History

Shakespeare's History PDF Author: Lily B Campbell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136566368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
First published in 1947 in the USA. This edition reprints the first UK edition of 1964. Published to critical acclaim, the central argument of this book is that the historical play must be studied as a genre separate from tragedy and comedy. Just as there is in Shakespearean tragedies a dominant ethical pattern of passion opposed to reason, so there is in the history plays a dominant political pattern characteristic of the political philosophy of the age. From the 'troublesome reign' of King John to the 'tragical doings' of Richard III, Shakespeare wove the events of English history into plots of universal interest.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays PDF Author: Michael Hattaway
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113982631X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
Shakespeare's history plays have been performed more in recent years than ever before, in Britain, North America, and in Europe. This 2002 volume provides an accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's history and Roman plays. It is attentive throughout to the plays as they have been performed over the centuries since they were written. The first part offers accounts of the genre of the history play, of Renaissance historiography, of pageants and masques, and of women's roles, as well as comparisons with history plays in Spain and the Netherlands. Chapters in the second part look at individual plays as well as other Shakespearean texts which are closely related to the histories. The Companion offers a full bibliography, genealogical tables, and a list of principal and recurrent characters. It is a comprehensive guide for students, researchers and theatre-goers alike.

Shakespeare's English Kings

Shakespeare's English Kings PDF Author: Peter Saccio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019988076X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Far more than any professional historian, Shakespeare is responsible for whatever notions most of us possess about English medieval history. Anyone who appreciates the dramatic action of Shakespeare's history plays but is confused by much of the historical detail will welcome this guide to the Richards, Edwards, Henrys, Warwicks and Norfolks who ruled and fought across Shakespeare's page and stage. Not only theater-goers and students, but today's film-goers who want to enrich their understanding of film adaptations of plays such as Richard III and Henry V will find this revised edition of Shakespeare's English Kings to be an essential companion. Saccio's engaging narrative weaves together three threads: medieval English history according to the Tudor chroniclers who provided Shakespeare with his material, that history as understood by modern scholars, and the action of the plays themselves. Including a new preface, a revised further reading list, genealogical charts, an appendix of names and titles, and an index, the second edition of Shakespeare's English Kings offers excellent background reading for all of the ten history plays.

Stages of History

Stages of History PDF Author: Phyllis Rackin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150172472X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Phyllis Rackin offers a fresh approach to Shakespeare's English history plays, rereading them in the context of a world where rapid cultural change transformed historical consciousness and gave the study of history a new urgency. Rackin situates Shakespeare's English chronicles among multiple discourses, particularly the controversies surrounding the functions of poetry, theater, and history. She focuses on areas of contention in Renaissance historiography that are also areas of concern in recent criticism-historical authority and causation, the problems of anachronism and nostalgia, and the historical construction of class and gender. She analyzes the ways in which the perfoace of history in Shakespeare's theater participated—and its representation in subsequent criticism still participates—in the contests between opposed theories of history and between the different ideological interests and historiographic practices they authorize. Celebrating the heroic struggles of the past and recording the patriarchal genealogies of kings and nobles, Tudor historians provided an implicit rationale for the hierarchical order of their own time; but the new public theater where socially heterogeneous audiences came together to watch common players enact the roles of their social superiors was widely perceived as subverting that order. Examining such sociohistorical factors as the roles of women and common men and the conditions of theatrical performance, Rackin explores what happened when elite historical discourse was trans porteto the public commercial theater. She argues that Shakespeare's chronicles transformed univocal historical writing into polyphonic theatrical scripts that expressed the contradictions of Elizabethan culture.

Shakespeare's Kings

Shakespeare's Kings PDF Author: John Julius Norwich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743200314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
Compares the historical kings with their portrayal in Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare's History Plays

Shakespeare's History Plays PDF Author: A. J. Hoenselaars
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521829021
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This volume, with a foreword by Dennis Kennedy, addresses a range of attitudes to Shakespeare's English history plays in Britain and abroad from the early seventeenth century to the present day. It concentrates on the play texts as well as productions, translations and adaptations of them. The essays explore the multiple points of intersection between the English history they recount and the experience of British and other national cultures, establishing the plays as genres not only relevant to the political and cultural history of Britain but also to the history of nearly every nation worldwide. The plays have had a rich international reception tradition but critics and theatre historians abroad, those practising 'foreign' Shakespeare, have tended to ignore these plays in favour of the comedies and tragedies. By presenting the British and foreign Shakespeare traditions side by side, this volume seeks to promote a more finely integrated world Shakespeare.

Engendering a Nation

Engendering a Nation PDF Author: Jean Elizabeth Howard
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415047494
Category : Drama
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. Taking the Shakespearean history play as their point of departure, the authors argue that the change from dynastic kingdom to modern nation was integrally connected to shifts in cultural understandings of gender, and in the social roles available to men and women. The cultural centrality of Elizabethan theatre made it an important arena for staging the diverse and contradictory elements of this transition. Plays featured include: King John Henry VI, Part I Henry VI, Part II Henry, Part III Richard III Richard II Henry V Engendering a Nation makes an original and topical contribution to the study of Shakespeare's history plays and is especially valuable to students and scholars with an interest in where feminist and historicist approaches to the Renaissance intersect. Part I: Making Gender Visible: A Re-Viewing of Shakespeare's History Plays 1. Thoroughly Modern Henry 2. The History Play in Shakespeare's Time 3. Feminism, Women, and the Shakespearean History Pla.

William Shakespeare: Histories

William Shakespeare: Histories PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1604136383
Category : Historical drama, English
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Shakespeare.