Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments

Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments PDF Author: Robert G. Hunter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338540
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Robert G. Hunter maintains that the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Elizabethan mind was in great part responsible for the emergence of the outstanding tragedies of the age. Luther and Calvin caused men to ask how God can be just if man is not free, and Shakespeare's greatest tragedies confront the vexing problems posed by these altered conceptions of man's freedom of will and God's providential control of natural circumstance. Shakespeare's audiences were not single-minded. He wrote for semi-Pelagians, Augustinians, Calvinists, and men and women who did not know what to think. Confl icting certainties, doubts, and uncertainties were his raw material, both within his mind and the minds of the audience. Hunter shows how Shakespeare uses the major attitudes toward God's judgment in creating Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He notes that Shakespeare's different viewpoints are the heart of the tragedies themselves. Even after Shakespeare's imaginative considerations of the mysteries, the tragedies seem to consistently provide questions rather than answers, and what they inspire in their beholders is more likely to be doubt than faith.

Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments

Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments PDF Author: Robert G. Hunter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338540
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Robert G. Hunter maintains that the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Elizabethan mind was in great part responsible for the emergence of the outstanding tragedies of the age. Luther and Calvin caused men to ask how God can be just if man is not free, and Shakespeare's greatest tragedies confront the vexing problems posed by these altered conceptions of man's freedom of will and God's providential control of natural circumstance. Shakespeare's audiences were not single-minded. He wrote for semi-Pelagians, Augustinians, Calvinists, and men and women who did not know what to think. Confl icting certainties, doubts, and uncertainties were his raw material, both within his mind and the minds of the audience. Hunter shows how Shakespeare uses the major attitudes toward God's judgment in creating Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He notes that Shakespeare's different viewpoints are the heart of the tragedies themselves. Even after Shakespeare's imaginative considerations of the mysteries, the tragedies seem to consistently provide questions rather than answers, and what they inspire in their beholders is more likely to be doubt than faith.

Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare

Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare PDF Author: Robert Rentoul ReedJr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813164419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Divine retribution, Robert Reed argues, is a principal driving force in Shakespeare's English history plays and three of his major tragedies. Reed finds evidence of the playwright's growing ingenuity and maturing skill in his treatment of the crime of political homicide, its impact on events, and God's judgment on the criminal. Reed's analysis focuses upon Tudor concepts that he shows were familiar to all Elizabethans—the biblical principle of inherited guilt, the doctrine that God is the fountainhead of retribution, with man merely His instrument, and the view that conscience serves a fundamentally divine function—and he urges us to look at Shakespeare within the context of his time, avoiding the too-frequent tendency of twentieth-century critics to force a modern world view on the plays. Heaven's power of vengeance provides an essential unifying theme to the plays of the two historical tetralogies, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth. By analyzing these plays in the light of values held by Shakespeare's contemporaries, Reed has made a substantial contribution toward clarifying our understanding of the plays and of Elizabethan England.

In the Company of Shakespeare

In the Company of Shakespeare PDF Author: Thomas Moisan
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838639023
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This book is an anthology of critical essays written about English literature during the Renaissance (or the 'early-modern' period). It focuses on Shakespeare's poetry and plays, including the 'Sonnets', 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'King Lear', 'Othello', 'Measure for Measure', and 'Timon of Athens'. Also examined are the publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, William Cartwright's play 'The Royal Slave', and James Halliwell-Phillips, one of the central figures in the Shakespearean textual tradition.

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.

Macbeth

Macbeth PDF Author:
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135870896
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description


Shakespeare's Reading Audiences

Shakespeare's Reading Audiences PDF Author: Cyndia Susan Clegg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108121373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This study grows out of the intersection of two realms of scholarly investigation - the emerging public sphere in early modern England and the history of the book. Shakespeare's Reading Audiences examines the ways in which different communities - humanist, legal, religious and political - would have interpreted Shakespeare's plays and poems, whether printed or performed. Cyndia Susan Clegg begins by analysing elite reading clusters associated with the Court, the universities, and the Inns of Court and how their interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Henry V arose from their reading of Italian humanists. She concludes by examining how widely held public knowledge about English history both affected Richard II's reception and how such knowledge was appropriated by the State. She also considers The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, and Othello from the point of view of audience members conversant in popular English legal writing and Macbeth from the perspective of popular English Calvinism.

Othello

Othello PDF Author: Philip C. Kolin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136017984
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare PDF Author: Herbert R. Coursen
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838637746
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to examine recent productions of Shakespeare on stage and film and to lay out some interpretive guidelines for responding to the scripts as recreated in these two very different formats and within the conflicted environment of shifting critical paradigms. The two traditions - Shakespeare on stage and Shakespeare on film - have experienced a midair collision with postmodernism. The results are beginning to be chronicled.

Sinister Aesthetics

Sinister Aesthetics PDF Author: Joel Elliot Slotkin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319527975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This engrossing volume studies the poetics of evil in early modern English culture, reconciling the Renaissance belief that literature should uphold morality with the compelling and attractive representations of evil throughout the period’s literature. The chapters explore a variety of texts, including Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Richard III, broadside ballads, and sermons, culminating in a new reading of Paradise Lost and a novel understanding of the dynamic interaction between aesthetics and theology in shaping seventeenth century Protestant piety. Through these discussions, the book introduces the concept of “sinister aesthetics”: artistic conventions that can make representations of the villainous, monstrous, or hellish pleasurable.

Hamlet's Problematic Revenge

Hamlet's Problematic Revenge PDF Author: William F. Zak
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498513115
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Hamlet's Problematic Revenge: Forging a Royal Mandate provides a new argument within Shakespearean studies that argues the oft-noted arrest of the play’s dramaturgical momentum, especially evident in Hamlet’s much delayed enactment of his revenge, represents in fact a succinct emblem of the “arrested development” in the moral maturity of the entire cast, most notably, Hamlet himself—as the unifying disclosure and tragic problem in the play. Settling for unreflective and short-sighted personal gratifications and cold comforts, they truantly elbow aside a more considerable moral obligation. Again and again, all yield this duty’s commanding priority to a childishly self-regarding fear of offending those in nominal positions of power and questionable positions of authority—figures, like Ophelia and Hamlet’s fathers, for instance, demanding an unworthy deference. While Hamlet fails to consider with loving regard the improved well-being of the larger community to which he owes his existence and, fails to interrogate the moral adequacy of the Ghost’s command of violent reprisal (two things he never does nor even contemplates doing), “all occasions” in the play “do inform against” him and merely “spur a dull revenge”—not, as he interprets his own words, arguing the need for greater urgency in his vendetta, but, instead, to “inform against” the criminality of that very course itself. His revenge therefore can be argued as “dull,” not because he cannot summon the wherewithal to enact it more bloodily, but because in obsessing about it ceaselessly he remains unreceptive to its “dull” or “unenlightened” opposition to the evil he hopes to eradicate. Hamlet does not avenge his father; this book argues that he becomes him. Amidst a wealth of previously unremarked figurative mirrorings, as well as much of the seemingly digressive material in Hamlet within Shakespearean studies, Hamlet’s Problematic Revenge brings to light a new interpretation of the tragic problem in the play.