The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies

The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies PDF Author: Susan Snyder
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Comic elements in Shakespeare's tragedies have often been noted, but while most critics have tended to concentrate on humorous interludes or on a single play, Susan Snyder seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare used the conventions, structures, and assumptions of comedy in his tragic writing. She argues that Shakespeare's early mastery of romantic comedy deeply influenced his tragedies both in dramaturgy and in the expression and development of his tragic vision. From this perspective she sheds new light on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The author shows Shakespeare's tragic vision evolving as he moves through three possibilities: comedy and tragedy functioning first as polar opposites, later as two sides of the same coin, and finally as two elements in a single compound. In the four plays examined here, Professor Snyder finds that traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape the tragedy: they set up expectations which when proven false reinforce the movement into tragic inevitability; they underline tragic awareness by a pointed irrelevance; they establish a point of departure for tragedy when comedy's happy assumptions reveal their paradoxical "shadow" side; and they become part of the tragedy itself when the comic elements threaten the tragic hero with insignificance and absurdity. Susan Snyder is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies

The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies PDF Author: Susan Snyder
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
Comic elements in Shakespeare's tragedies have often been noted, but while most critics have tended to concentrate on humorous interludes or on a single play, Susan Snyder seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare used the conventions, structures, and assumptions of comedy in his tragic writing. She argues that Shakespeare's early mastery of romantic comedy deeply influenced his tragedies both in dramaturgy and in the expression and development of his tragic vision. From this perspective she sheds new light on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The author shows Shakespeare's tragic vision evolving as he moves through three possibilities: comedy and tragedy functioning first as polar opposites, later as two sides of the same coin, and finally as two elements in a single compound. In the four plays examined here, Professor Snyder finds that traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape the tragedy: they set up expectations which when proven false reinforce the movement into tragic inevitability; they underline tragic awareness by a pointed irrelevance; they establish a point of departure for tragedy when comedy's happy assumptions reveal their paradoxical "shadow" side; and they become part of the tragedy itself when the comic elements threaten the tragic hero with insignificance and absurdity. Susan Snyder is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Christian Settings in Shakespeare's Tragedies

Christian Settings in Shakespeare's Tragedies PDF Author: D. Douglas Waters
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838635285
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Battenhouse's Shakespearean tragedy: Its art and Christian premises, Irving Ribner's Patterns in Shakespearian tragedy, Virgil K. Whitaker's The mirror up to nature: The techniques of Shakespeare's tragedies, and Robert Grams Hunter's Shakespeare and the mystery of God's judgments. Waters questions, for example, Battenhouse's validity of Christian theological and didactic emphases on the old purgation theory of catharsis. His approach differs also from Northrop Frye's views on the tragedies in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, an archetypal approach to representative plays including the tragedies.

The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare

The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare PDF Author: Christopher J. Cobb
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874139716
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This book examines Shakespeare's response in his late plays to the challenge of making romance stories believable through theatrical representation and the kind of experience the late plays in performance seek to create for their spectators. Taking The Winter's Tale as a case study, the book's central chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare tests and transforms the techniques to create the sweeping, restorative transformations of individuals and communities that are central to both earlier dramatic romances and Shakespeare's own romance experiments. The book's three other chapters address the methodologies for study of spectator's experience through a dramatic text, the history of dramatic romance to 1610, and Shakespeare's further experiments with the staging of romance after The Winter's Tale.-

Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos

Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos PDF Author: T. McAlindon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521566056
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This study focuses on Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, the four main tragedies and Antony and Cleopatra. Tom McAlindon argues that there were two models of nature in Renaissance culture, one hierarchical, in which everything has an appointed place, and the other contrarious, showing nature as a tense system of interacting opposites, liable to sudden collapse and transformation. This latter model informs Shakespeare's tragedy.

William Shakespeare: His influence

William Shakespeare: His influence PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Contains sixty original essays by historians, scholars, critics, writers, and actors, which provide a variety of perspectives on the world, work, and influence of sixteenth-century playwright and poet William Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare PDF Author: John F. Andrews
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
ISBN: 9780684178516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
His world, his work, his influence.

Shakespeare and Senecan Tragedy

Shakespeare and Senecan Tragedy PDF Author: Curtis Perry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108496172
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Perry reveals Shakespeare derived modes of tragic characterization, previously seen as presciently modern, via engagement with Rome and Senecan tragedy.

The Woe and the Wonder of Despair

The Woe and the Wonder of Despair PDF Author: King Kok Cheung
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Despair in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description


Last Things and Last Plays

Last Things and Last Plays PDF Author: Cynthia Marshall
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809316892
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
In this first sustained examination of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and The Tempest in the context of English Renaissance discussions of death, judgment, and afterlife, Cynthia Marshall contends that the late plays of Shakespeare represent the active concerns of a culture heavily imbued with apocalypticism. Only recently has there been wide recognition of how thoroughly apocalyptic thought pervaded the culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Millenarians, Puritans, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics all shared a concern for last things. Even King James I, speaking in Star Chamber, referred to "the latter days drawing on." In fact, these four plays, considered in themselves, exhibit distinctive qualities of "lastness." They contain, Marshall argues, an alternative theatrical eschatology, representing anxieties about judgment, hopes for personal reunion, and transcendent perspectives on time.

The Forms of Things Unknown

The Forms of Things Unknown PDF Author: Mark Stavig
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
1995 marks the 400th anniversary of the probable first production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Though the similarities between these two plays have long been recognized, surprisingly little has been written on what they have in common. As Mark Stavig points out, not only do these plays share a self-consciously poetic approach to drama and a common topic -- the troubles of young lovers living in a hostile familial and societal context -- but they also share a framework of Renaissance metaphor built on gender oppositions and unities. In the primarily public and rational world of late sixteenth century England, interest in the more poetic and subjective dimensions of human experience was growing. Elizabethan writers, including Shakespeare, were searching for ways to communicate what Theseus somewhat skeptically calls the forms of things unknown' -- that realm of experience that can be expressed best (or perhaps only) through the language of metaphor. While recent Shakespeare criticism has tended to oversimplify Shakespeare's handling of gender by seeing him either as a supporter or an opponent of patricarchy, Stavig finds a more complex conception of gender in Shakespeare's psychology of love and in his depiction of society, nature and the cosmos. To appreciate these patterns of metaphor, we must understand the Petrarchism and neo-Platonism that were undergoing a resurgence in the 1590s. What emerges in Stavig's exploration is neither a scientific system nor a set of beliefs, but rather a flexible structure of metaphors that provides the context for a fresh and rewarding approach to these plays.