Author: Susan Snyder
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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
Author: Susan Snyder
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196613
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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
Author: D. Douglas Waters
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838635285
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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.
Publisher: Associated University Presse
ISBN: 9780838635285
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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
Author: Christopher J. Cobb
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874139716
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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.-
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874139716
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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.-
William Shakespeare: His influence
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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
Author: John F. Andrews
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
ISBN: 9780684178516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
His world, his work, his influence.
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
ISBN: 9780684178516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
His world, his work, his influence.
The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies
Author: Susan Snyder
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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.
Shakespeare's Late Tragedies
Author: Susanne Lindgren Wofford
Publisher: Pearson
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
A truly useful collection of literary criticism on a widely studied author, this collection of essays, selected and introduced by a distinguished scholar, makes the most informative and provocative critical work easily available to the general public. KEY TOPICS: Offers volumes of the same excellence for the contemporary moment. Captures and makes accessible the most stimulating critical writing of our time on a crucial literary figure of the past. Also included is an introduction to the author's life and work, a chronology of important dates, and a selected bibliography.
Publisher: Pearson
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
A truly useful collection of literary criticism on a widely studied author, this collection of essays, selected and introduced by a distinguished scholar, makes the most informative and provocative critical work easily available to the general public. KEY TOPICS: Offers volumes of the same excellence for the contemporary moment. Captures and makes accessible the most stimulating critical writing of our time on a crucial literary figure of the past. Also included is an introduction to the author's life and work, a chronology of important dates, and a selected bibliography.
The Forms of Things Unknown
Author: Mark Stavig
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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.
The Woe and the Wonder of Despair
Author: King Kok Cheung
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Despair in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 464
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Despair in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 464
Book Description
Shakespeare's Pluralistic Concepts of Character
Author: Imtiaz H. Habib
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780945636373
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
The presentation of a complex character such as Shylock bears resemblance to the technique of anamorphic portraiture and trick perspective in the sense that, seen one way he appears a villain, but seen another way he appears a persecuted victim. The clashing and merging of opposed frames of ideological reference that cannot be held apart or resolved and that remain in a kind of uneasy balance may be a technique of comic characterization that exploits relativism and ambiguity in the presentation of human personality and self on stage. A similar technique can be seen at work in the Histories in the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke, who, as has long been noted, compete contrarily for the audience's ideological sympathies over the course of the play.
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780945636373
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
The presentation of a complex character such as Shylock bears resemblance to the technique of anamorphic portraiture and trick perspective in the sense that, seen one way he appears a villain, but seen another way he appears a persecuted victim. The clashing and merging of opposed frames of ideological reference that cannot be held apart or resolved and that remain in a kind of uneasy balance may be a technique of comic characterization that exploits relativism and ambiguity in the presentation of human personality and self on stage. A similar technique can be seen at work in the Histories in the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke, who, as has long been noted, compete contrarily for the audience's ideological sympathies over the course of the play.