Author: Sean Keilen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317041682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.
Author: Sean Keilen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317041674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 470
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Book Description
In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.
Author: Dustin W. Dixon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350098159
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
The gods have much to tell us about performance. When human actors portray deities onstage, such divine epiphanies reveal not only the complexities of mortals playing gods but also the nature of theatrical spectacle itself. The very impossibility of rendering the gods in all their divine splendor in a truly convincing way lies at the intersection of divine power and the power of the theater. This book pursues these dynamics on the stages of ancient Athens and Rome as well on those of Renaissance England to shed new light on theatrical performance. The authors reveal how gods appear onstage both to astound and to dramatize the very machinations by which theatrical performance operates. Offering an array of case studies featuring both canonical and lesser-studied texts, this volume discusses work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plautus as well as Beaumont, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. This book uniquely brings together the joint perspectives of two experts on classical and Renaissance drama. This volume will appeal to students and enthusiasts of literature, classics, theater, and performance studies.
Author: Tania Demetriou
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152614025X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood’s thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood’s better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.
Author: Lindsay Ann Reid
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845180
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
A study of how the use of Ovid in Middle English texts affected Shakespeare's treatment of the poet.
Author: Natalya Baldyga
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135099286
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 469
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Book Description
While eighteenth-century playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing made numerous contributions in his lifetime to the theater, the text that best documents his dynamic and shifting views on dramatic theory is also that which continues to resonate with later generations – the Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767–69). This collection of 104 short essays represents one of the eighteenth century’s most important critical engagements with the theater and its potential to promote humanistic discourse. Lessing’s essays are an immensely erudite, deeply engaged, witty, ironic, and occasionally scathing investigation of European theatrical culture, bolstered by deep analysis of Aristotelian dramatic theory and utopian visions of theater as a vehicle for human connection. This is the first complete English translation of Lessing's text, with extensive annotations that place the work in its historical context. For the first time, English-language readers can trace primary source references and link Lessing’s observations on drama, theory, and performance not only to the plays he discusses, but also to dramatic criticism and acting theory. This volume also includes three introductory essays that situate Lessing’s work both within his historical time period and in terms of his influence on Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theater and criticism. The newly translated Hamburg Dramaturgy will speak to dramaturgs, directors, and humanities scholars who see theater not only for entertainment, but also for philosophical and political debate.
Author: Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 150151315X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Jennifer C. Vaught illustrates how architectural rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser provides a bridge between the human body and mind and the nonhuman world of stone and timber. The recurring figure of the body as a besieged castle in Shakespeare’s drama and Spenser’s allegory reveals that their works are mutually based on medieval architectural allegories exemplified by the morality play The Castle of Perseverance. Intertextual and analogous connections between the generically hybrid works of Shakespeare and Spenser demonstrate how they conceived of individuals not in isolation from the physical environment but in profound relation to it. This book approaches the interlacing of identity and place in terms of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cognitive theory, and Cicero’s art of memory. Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser examines figures of the permeable body as a fortified, yet vulnerable structure in Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and Sonnets and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Complaints.
Author: Katherine Walker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350044636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
With the recent turn to science studies and interdisciplinary research in Shakespearean scholarship, Shakespeare and Science: A Dictionary, provides a pedagogical resource for students and scholars. In charting Shakespeare's engagement with natural philosophical discourse, this edition shapes the future of Shakespearean scholarship and pedagogy significantly, appealing to students entering the field and current scholars in interdisciplinary research on the topic alongside the non-professional reader seeking to understand Shakespeare's language and early modern scientific practices. Shakespeare's works respond to early modern culture's rapidly burgeoning interest in how new astronomical theories, understandings of motion and change, and the cataloging of objects, vegetation, and animals in the natural world could provide new knowledge. To cite a famous example, Hamlet's letter to Ophelia plays with the differences between the Ptolemaic and Copernican notions of the earth's movement: “Doubt that the sun doth move” may either be, in the Ptolemaic view, an earnest plea or, in the Copernican system, a purposeful equivocation. The Dictionary contextualizes such moments and scientific terms that Shakespeare employs, creatively and critically, throughout his poetry and drama. The focus is on Shakespeare's multiform uses of language, rendering accessible to students of Shakespeare such terms as “firmament,” “planetary influence,” and “retrograde.”
Author: Nick Moschovakis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104009709X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal–historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine.
Author: Daniel Blank
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192886118
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Dramatic performances at the universities in early modern England have usually been regarded as insular events, completely removed from the plays of the London stage. Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England challenges that long-held notion, illuminating how an apparently secluded theatrical culture became a major source of inspiration for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While many university plays featured classical themes, others reflected upon the academic environments in which they were produced, allowing a window into the universities themselves. This window proved especially fruitful for Shakespeare, who, as this book reveals, had a sustained fascination with the universities and their inhabitants. Daniel Blank provides groundbreaking new readings of plays from throughout Shakespeare's career, illustrating how depictions of academic culture in Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, and Macbeth were shaped by university plays. Shakespeare was not unique, however. This book also discusses the impact of university drama on professional plays by Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Ben Jonson, all of whom in various ways facilitated the connection between the university stage and the London commercial stage. Yet this connection, perhaps counterintuitively, is most significant in the works of a playwright who had no formal attachment to Oxford or Cambridge. Shakespeare, this study shows, was at the center of a rich exchange between two seemingly disparate theatrical worlds.
