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Author: Peter Whisson
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595200001
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Dynastic turmoil in 15th Century England? No thanks! For many people Shakespeare's histories rank a distant third behind his tragedies and comedies. Obscure lords and long-forgotten battles. So the image goes. Yet some of these same plays tell superb stories, and contain scenes and characters that are among the liveliest and most memorable in all literature.Here, four of the very best, Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth Parts One and Two, and Henry the Fifth are presented as 'productions for the page'-consecutive stories for the modern reader. Be bemused no longer by endless kings, dukes and earls, acting out their arguments in iambic verse. Follow instead, as if in the midst of events, Shakespeare's masterly unfolding of a classic pattern of revolution, suppression of enemies, and conquest abroad.
Author: Peter Whisson
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595200001
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Get Book Here
Book Description
Dynastic turmoil in 15th Century England? No thanks! For many people Shakespeare's histories rank a distant third behind his tragedies and comedies. Obscure lords and long-forgotten battles. So the image goes. Yet some of these same plays tell superb stories, and contain scenes and characters that are among the liveliest and most memorable in all literature.Here, four of the very best, Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth Parts One and Two, and Henry the Fifth are presented as 'productions for the page'-consecutive stories for the modern reader. Be bemused no longer by endless kings, dukes and earls, acting out their arguments in iambic verse. Follow instead, as if in the midst of events, Shakespeare's masterly unfolding of a classic pattern of revolution, suppression of enemies, and conquest abroad.
Author: Helen Cooper
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521683068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 39
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Book Description
Helen Cooper's inaugural lecture traces the influence of medieval literature on the Renaissance, particularly in Shakespeare's work.
Author: Martha W. Driver
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786491655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.
Author: Ruth Morse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016274
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
This book gives readers the opportunity to appreciate Shakespeare from the perspectives of the late-medieval European traditions that surrounded him.
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.
Author: Kurt A. Schreyer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080145509X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
In Shakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare’s connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city’s cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects—as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors—to the Shakespearean stage.As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare’s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare’s stage—including the ass’s head of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth—were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.
Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199558175
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Middle Ages brings together a distinguished, multidisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the medieval origins of modernity. Shakespeare provides them with the perfect focus, since his works turn back to the Middle Ages as decisively as they anticipate the modern world: almost all of the histories depict events during the Hundred Years War, and King John glances even further back to the thirteenth-century Angevins; several of the comedies, tragedies, and romances rest on medieval sources; and there are important medieval antecedents for some of the poetic modes in which he worked as well. Several of the essays reread Shakespeare by recovering aspects of his works that are derived from medieval traditions and whose significance has been obscured by the desire to read Shakespeare as the origin of the modern. These essays, taken cumulatively, challenge the idea of any decisive break between the medieval period and early modernity by demonstrating continuities of form and imagination that clearly bridge the gap. Other essays explore the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries constructed or imagined relationships between past and present. Attending to the way these writers thought about their relationship to the past makes it possible, in turn, to read against the grain of our own teleological investment in the idea of early modernity. A third group of essays reads texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as documents participating in social-cultural transformation from within. This means attending to the way they themselves grapples with the problem of change, attempting to respond to new conditions and pressures while holding onto customary habits of thought and imagination. Taken together, the essays in this volume revisit the very idea of transition in a refreshingly non-teleological way.
Author: Helen Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408138999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
Helen Cooper's unique study examines how continuations of medieval culture into the early modern period, forged Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and poet. Medieval culture pervaded his life and work, from his childhood, spent within reach of the last performances of the Coventry Corpus Christi plays, to his dramatisation of Chaucer in The Two Noble Kinsmen three years before his death. The world he lived in was still largely a medieval one, in its topography and its institutions. The language he spoke had been forged over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. The genres in which he wrote, not least historical tragedy, love-comedy and romance, were medieval inventions. A high proportion of his plays have medieval origins and he kept returning to Chaucer, acknowledged as the greatest poet in the English language. Above all, he grew up with an English tradition of drama developed during the Middle Ages that assumed that it was possible to stage anything - all time, all space. Shakespeare and the Medieval World provides a panoramic overview that opens up new vistas within his work and uncovers the richness of his inheritance.
Author: Robert Hornback
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
A new account of medieval and Renaissance clown traditions reveals the true extent of their cultural influence.
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.
