Shakespeare in a Divided America

Shakespeare in a Divided America PDF Author: James Shapiro
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525522298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.

Shakespeare in a Divided America

Shakespeare in a Divided America PDF Author: James Shapiro
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525522298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.

Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now (LOA #251)

Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now (LOA #251) PDF Author: Various
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598534637
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
An anthology that traces how Shakespeare has shaped American history and culture—featuring pieces by Founding Fathers, Orson Welles, and other noteworthy figures “The history of Shakespeare in America,” writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology, “is also the history of America itself.” Shakespeare was a central, inescapable part of America’s literary inheritance, and a prism through which crucial American issues—revolution, slavery, war, social justice—were refracted and understood. In tracing the many surprising forms this influence took, Shapiro draws on many genres—poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, comedy routines—and on a remarkable range of American writers from Emerson, Melville, Lincoln, and Mark Twain to James Agee, John Berryman, Pauline Kael, and Cynthia Ozick. Americans of the revolutionary era ponder the question “to sign or not to sign;” Othello becomes the focal point of debates on race; the Astor Place riots, set off by a production of Macbeth, attest to the violent energies aroused by theatrical controversies; Jane Addams finds in King Lear a metaphor for American struggles between capital and labor. Orson Welles revolutionizes approaches to Shakespeare with his legendary productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar; American actors from Charlotte Cushman and Ira Aldridge to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reimagine Shakespeare for each new era. The rich and tangled story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own is a literary and historical revelation. As a special feature, the book includes a foreword by Bill Clinton, among the latest in a long line of American presidents, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, who, as the collection demonstrates, have turned to Shakespeare’s plays for inspiration.

Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories

Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories PDF Author: Larry S. Champion
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033846X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Larry S. Champion examines Shakespeare's English history plays and describes the structural devices through which Shakespeare controls the audience's angle of vision and its response to the pattern of historical events. Champion observes the experimentation between stage worlds and the significance of a dramatic technique unique to the history play—one that combines the detachment of a documentary necessary for a broad intellectual view of history and the simultaneous engagement between character and spectator. Champion sees a conscious bifurcation occurring in Shakespeare's dramaturgy after Richard II. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare continues to focus on the psychological analysis and internalized protagonist which lead to his major tragic achievements. In King John and Henry IV, the playwright develops a middle ground between the polarities of Henry VI, in which the flat, onedimensional characters essentially serve the purposes of the narrative, and the tragedies, in which the spectator's consuming interest is in the developing centralfigure whose critical moments they share. Champion sees Henry V as the culmination of Shakespeare's e fforts in the English history play.

Paris on Air

Paris on Air PDF Author: Oliver Gee
Publisher: Earful Tower Publishing
ISBN: 9781098301996
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Join award-winning podcaster Oliver Gee on this laugh-out-loud journey through the streets of Paris. He tells of how five years in France have taught him how to order cheese, make a Parisian person smile, and convince anyone you can fake French (even if, like Oliver, you speak the language like an Australian cow). A fresh voice on the Paris scene, he shares the soaring highs and crushing lows that come with following your dreams to the French capital. He also befriends the city's too-cool-for-school basketballers, chases runaway crocodiles, and goes on a mammoth honeymoon trip around France on his little red scooter.

Shakespeare in Charge

Shakespeare in Charge PDF Author: Normand Augustine
Publisher: Miramax Books
ISBN: 9780786886449
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Drawing wide acclaim in hardcovera brilliant guide to management based on the principles explored in Shakespeares plays. Timelessly wise and externally popular, the plays of Shakespeare are packed with essential insights into human psychology and the use and abuse of power. In Shakespeare in Charge, Norman Augustine, former Fortune 500 CEO, and Kenneth Adelman, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, show how the Bards shrewd understanding of palace politics and the strategies of warfare can just as easily be applied to the twists and turns of the corporate world.

Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare

Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare PDF Author: Paul A. Kottman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801895421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Paul A. Kottman offers a new and compelling understanding of tragedy as seen in four of Shakespeare’s mature plays—As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest. The author pushes beyond traditional ways of thinking about tragedy, framing his readings with simple questions that have been missing from scholarship of the past generation: Are we still moved by Shakespeare, and why? Kottman throws into question the inheritability of human relationships by showing how the bonds upon which we depend for meaning and worth can be dissolved. According to Kottman, the lives of Shakespeare's protagonists are conditioned by social bonds—kinship ties, civic relations, economic dependencies, political allegiances—that unravel irreparably. This breakdown means they can neither inherit nor bequeath a livable or desirable form of sociality. Orlando and Rosalind inherit nothing “but growth itself” before becoming refugees in the Forest of Arden; Hamlet is disinherited not only by Claudius’s election but by the sheer vacuity of the activities that remain open to him; Lear’s disinheritance of Cordelia bequeaths a series of events that finally leave the social sphere itself forsaken of heirs and forbearers alike. Firmly rooted in the philosophical tradition of reading Shakespeare, this bold work is the first sustained interpretation of Shakespearean tragedy since Stanley Cavell’s work on skepticism and A. C. Bradley’s century-old Shakespearean Tragedy.

The Bible in Shakespeare

The Bible in Shakespeare PDF Author: Hannibal Hamlin
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199677611
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
The Bible in Shakespeare is a critical study of the links between the two great pillars of English culture, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare

Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare PDF Author: M.M. Mahood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134673655
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
PUBLICITY TITLE Will appear in 1998 Theatre Craft leaflet and in a New Theatre Quarterly advert Re-issue of hardback published by CUP - this received exceptional review coverage M. Mahood is an all-time old-school Great: well known for Shakespeare's Wordplay and her Penguin editions of Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice The Pb will include a new appendix aimed at helping directors and actors Will appeal to actors and directors, critics and students The six studies of individual plays offers models for students to follow in studying and writing about the other thirty plays. Includes an index of characters as well as a detailed general index - very user friendly

Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination

Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination PDF Author: Ian Ward
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780406988034
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This work offers an analysis of constitutional law, examining Shakespeare's plays as legal texts. Professor Ward uses the plays as a starting point to investigate the development of constitutional ideas such as sovereignty, commonwealth, conscience and moral law, and the art of government. In the developing area of law and literature, this book examines how Shakespeare's work offers a rich source of textual material on legal subjects.

Shakespeare in Art

Shakespeare in Art PDF Author: Jane Martineau
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
'Shakespeare in Art' looks at the huge variety of painters who made Shakespeare's extremes of passion, his evocations of nature, his spirit world and his eternally familiar characters the subjects of their own work. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Western culture.