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Author: Alexander Leggatt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521779425
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.
Author: Alexander Leggatt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521779425
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.
Author: Dover Publications, Inc.
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 0486816060
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 451
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Book Description
A new and vital form of drama blossomed in 16th-century England, blending classic Latin comedy traditions with keen satires of contemporary London life. Although Shakespeare remains the most recognizable playwright of the Elizabethan age, there were many others whose work continues to entertain and educate students of drama to this day. This anthology collects timeless comedies that both informed Shakespeare's work and took inspiration from the Bard himself. Six plays include Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, the comedy that made the author's reputation; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay by Robert Greene, a groundbreaking play in terms of multiple-plot structure; The Shoemaker's Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker, the "Dickens of English theater"; All Fools, George Chapman's sprightly romp; A Trick to Catch the Old One by Thomas Middleton, one of the era's most prolific and successful playwrights; and Eastward Ho!, a collaborative work by Chapman, Jonson, and John Marston.
Author: Penny Gay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139469770
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
Why did theatre audiences laugh in Shakespeare's day? Why do they still laugh now? What did Shakespeare do with the conventions of comedy that he inherited, so that his plays continue to amuse and move audiences? What do his comedies have to say about love, sex, gender, power, family, community, and class? What place have pain, cruelty, and even death in a comedy? Why all those puns? In a survey that travels from Shakespeare's earliest experiments in farce and courtly love-stories to the great romantic comedies of his middle years and the mould-breaking experiments of his last decade's work, this book addresses these vital questions. Organised thematically, and covering all Shakespeare's comedies from the beginning to the end of his career, it provides readers with a map of the playwright's comic styles, showing how he built on comedic conventions as he further enriched the possibilities of the genre.
Author: Larry S. Champion
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674271418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
The evolution of Shakespeare's comedy, in Larry Champion's view, is apparent in the expansion of his comic vision to include a complete reflection of human life while maintaining a comic detachment for the audience. Like the other popular dramatists of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare used the diverse comic motifs and devices which time and custom had proved effective. He went further, however, and created progressively deeper levels of characterization and plot interaction, thereby forming characters who were not merely devices subordinated to the needs of the plot. Shakespeare's development as a comic playwright, suggests Champion, was "consistently in the direction of complexity or depth of characterization." His earliest works, like those of his contemporaries, are essentially situation comedies: the humor arises from action rather than character. There is no significant development of the main characters; instead, they are manipulated into situations which are humorous as a result, for example, of mistaken identity or slapstick confusion. The ensuing phase of Shakespeare's comedy sets forth plots in which the emphasis is on identity rather than physical action, a revelation of character which occurs in one of two forms: either a hypocrite is exposed for what he actually is or a character who has assumed an unnatural or abnormal pose is forced to realize and admit the ridiculousness of his position. In the final comedies involving sin and sacrificial forgiveness, however, character development is concerned with a "transformation of values." Although each of the comedies is discussed, Champion concentrates on nine, dividing them according to the complexity of characterization. He pursues as well the playwright's efforts to achieve for the spectator the detached stance so vital to comedy. Shakespeare obtained this perspective, Champion observes, through experimentation with the use of material mirroring the main action--mockery, parody, or caricature--and through the use of a "comic pointer" who is himself involved in the action but is sufficiently independent of the other characters to provide the audience with an omniscient view.
Author: Elissa Hare
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315305895
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
The book, first published in 1988, examines the role of magic in Elizabethan and Shakespearean theatre. The author observes how certain plays, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, rationalise the unrealism and improbabilities typical of romantic comedy as miracles wrought by specifically magical intervention. The author also explores the ways in which playwrights justify structural discontinuity by the working of magic. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.
Author: Linda Anderson
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874133196
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This study demonstrates not only that the devices of revenge are structurally useful in comedy, but also that there is a consistent conception of revenge as an ethical social instrument in the comedies of Shakespeare.
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 94
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Book Description
Author: Bart Van Es
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198723350
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
In this work, Bart Van Es analyses Shakespeare's comedic plays, picking out the family resemblances across these works. He considers their shared themes such as confusion and cross dressing, misguided love, twins and substitutions, and explores the bard's verbal artistry and wit.
Author: Michael Mangan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317895045
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.
Author: Cesar Lombardi Barber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691149526
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. "I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.
