Shakespeare on Love

Shakespeare on Love PDF Author: Joseph Pearce
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681494337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Having given the evidence for William Shakespeare's Catholicism in two previous books, literary biographer Joseph Pearce turns his attention in this work to the Bard's most famous play, Romeo and Juliet. "Star-crossed" Romeo and Juliet are Shakespeare's most famous lovers and perhaps the most well-known lovers in literary history. Though the young pair has been held up as a romantic ideal, the play is a tragedy, ending in death. What then, asks Pearce, is Shakespeare saying about his protagonists? Are they the hapless victims of fate, or are they partly to blame for their deaths? Is their love the "real thing", or is it self-indulgent passion? And what about the adults in their lives? Did they give the young people the example and guidance that they needed? The Catholic understanding of sexual desire, and its need to be ruled by reason, is on display in Romeo and Juliet, argues Pearce. The play is not a paean to romance but a cautionary tale about the naïveté and folly of youthful infatuation and the disastrous consequences of poor parenting. The well-known characters and their oft-quoted lines are rich in symbolic meaning that points us in the direction of the age-old wisdom of the Church. Although such a reading of Romeo and Juliet is countercultural in an age that glorifies the heedless and headless heart of young love, Pearce makes his case through a meticulous engagement with Shakespeare and his age and with the text of the play itself.

Shakespeare on Love

Shakespeare on Love PDF Author: Joseph Pearce
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681494337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Having given the evidence for William Shakespeare's Catholicism in two previous books, literary biographer Joseph Pearce turns his attention in this work to the Bard's most famous play, Romeo and Juliet. "Star-crossed" Romeo and Juliet are Shakespeare's most famous lovers and perhaps the most well-known lovers in literary history. Though the young pair has been held up as a romantic ideal, the play is a tragedy, ending in death. What then, asks Pearce, is Shakespeare saying about his protagonists? Are they the hapless victims of fate, or are they partly to blame for their deaths? Is their love the "real thing", or is it self-indulgent passion? And what about the adults in their lives? Did they give the young people the example and guidance that they needed? The Catholic understanding of sexual desire, and its need to be ruled by reason, is on display in Romeo and Juliet, argues Pearce. The play is not a paean to romance but a cautionary tale about the naïveté and folly of youthful infatuation and the disastrous consequences of poor parenting. The well-known characters and their oft-quoted lines are rich in symbolic meaning that points us in the direction of the age-old wisdom of the Church. Although such a reading of Romeo and Juliet is countercultural in an age that glorifies the heedless and headless heart of young love, Pearce makes his case through a meticulous engagement with Shakespeare and his age and with the text of the play itself.

Shakespeare on Love and Lust

Shakespeare on Love and Lust PDF Author: Maurice Charney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231500068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The complex and sometimes contradictory expressions of love in Shakespeare's works—ranging from the serious to the absurd and back again—arise primarily from his dramatic and theatrical flair rather than from a unified philosophy of love. Untangling his witty, bawdy (and ambiguous) treatment of love, sex, and desire requires a sharp eye and a steady hand. In Shakespeare on Love and Lust, noted scholar Maurice Charney delves deeply into Shakespeare's rhetorical and thematic development of this largest of subjects to reveal what makes his plays and poems resonate with contemporary audiences. The paradigmatic star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet, the comic confusions of couples wandering through the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello's tragic jealousy, the homoerotic ways Shakespeare played with cross-dressing on the Elizabethan stage—Charney explores the world in which Shakespeare lived, and how it is reflected and transformed in the one he created. While focusing primarily on desire between young lovers, Charney also explores themes of love in marriage (Brutus and Portia) and in same-sex pairings (Antonio and Sebastian). Against the conventions of Renaissance literature, Shakespeare qualified the Platonic view that true love transcends the physical. Instead, as Charney demonstrates, love in Shakespeare's work is almost always sexual as well as spiritual, and the full range of desire's dramatic possibilities is displayed. Shakespeare on Love and Lust begins by considering the ways in which Shakespeare drew upon and satirized the conventions of Petrarchan Renaissance love poetry in plays like Romeo and Juliet, then explores how courtship is woven into the basic plot formula of the comedies. Next, Charney examines love in the tragedies and the enemies of love (Iago, for example). Later chapters cover the gender complications in such plays as Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew as well as the homoerotic themes woven into many of the poems and plays. Charney concludes with a lively discussion of paradoxes and ambivalences about love expressed by Shakespeare's word play and sexual innuendoes.

Shakespeare on Love and Friendship

Shakespeare on Love and Friendship PDF Author: Allan Bloom
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226060453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
In particular, we see the full variety of erotic connections, from the "star-crossed" devotions of Romeo and Juliet to the failed romance of Troilus and Cressida to the problematic friendship of Falstaff and Hal.".

Love and its Critics

Love and its Critics PDF Author: Michael Bryson
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783743514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.

Shakespeare, Love and Language

Shakespeare, Love and Language PDF Author: David Schalkwyk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107187230
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Comprehensive study of the concept of love in Shakespeare's work, exploring historical contexts, theory and philosophy of love.

Shakespeare, Love and Service

Shakespeare, Love and Service PDF Author: David Schalkwyk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107411654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Peter Laslett's comment, in The World We Have Lost, that in the early modern period 'every relationship could be seen as a love-relationship' presents the governing idea of this book. In an analysis that includes Shakespeare's sonnets and a wide range of his plays from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter's Tale, David Schalkwyk looks at the ways in which the personal, affective relations of love are informed by the social, structural interactions of service. Showing that service is not a 'class' concept, but rather determined the fundamental conditions of identity across the whole society, the book explores the inter-penetration of structure and effect in relationships as varied as monarch and subject, aristocrat and personal servant, master and slave, husband and wife, and lover and beloved, in the light of differences of rank, gender and sexual identity.

Shakespeare in Love

Shakespeare in Love PDF Author: Lee Hall
Publisher: Concord Theatricals
ISBN: 0573705208
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Young Will Shakespeare has writers block... the deadline for his new play is fast approaching but hes in desperate need of inspiration. That is, until he finds his muse – Viola. This beautiful young woman is Will’s greatest admirer and will stop at nothing (including breaking the law) to appear in his next play. Against a bustling background of mistaken identity, ruthless scheming and backstage theatrics, Will’s love for Viola quickly blossoms and inspires him to write his greatest masterpiece.

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love PDF Author: Marcus Nordlund
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810124238
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare’s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about love, biology, and culture raised by his method, Nordlund considers four specific forms of love in seven of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the vicissitudes of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, he argues that Shakespeare makes a sustained inquiry into the impact of culture and society upon the natural human affections. King Lear offers insight into the conflicted relationship between love and duty. In two problem plays about romantic love, Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well, the tension between individual idiosyncrasies and social consensus becomes especially salient. And finally, in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, Nordlund asks what Shakespeare can tell us about the dark avatar of jealousy.

Shakespeare in Love

Shakespeare in Love PDF Author: Marc Norman
Publisher: Gardners Books
ISBN: 9780571201082
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
The companion screenplay to the acclaimed Miramax/Universal/Bedford Falls Company Film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Ben Affleck, Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, and Dame Judy Dench. It is the summer of 1593, and the rising young star of London's theater scene, Will Shakespeare, faces a scourge like no other: a paralyzing bout of writer's block. The great Elizabethan age of entertainment unfolds around him, but Will is without inspiration, he just can't seem to work up any enthusiasm for his latest play, "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter." What he needs is a muse. She appears when Lady Viola, desperate to become an actor in a time when women are forbidden on stage, disguises herself as a man to audition for Will's play. But the guise slips away as their passion ignites. Now Will's quill again begins to flow, turning love into words, as Viola becomes his real-life Juliet and Romeo finds his reason to exist.

Romantic Shakespeare

Romantic Shakespeare PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780517210338
Category : Love
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description