Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination

Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination PDF Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230379192
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitations of Timon of Athens. The aim is to resist homogenising the plays but to recognise and explore the unique imaginative enterprise from which they arose.

Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination

Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination PDF Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230379192
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitations of Timon of Athens. The aim is to resist homogenising the plays but to recognise and explore the unique imaginative enterprise from which they arose.

Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination

Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination PDF Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 134924970X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relations of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heoric endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitations of Timon of Athens. The aim is to resist homogenising the plays but to recognise and explore the unique imaginative enterprise from which they arose.

The Tragic Imagination

The Tragic Imagination PDF Author: Rowan Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019873641X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of "the literary" has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognized as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. This short but thought-provoking volume asks the question, "What is it that tragedy makes us know?" The focus is on tragedy as a mode of representing the experience of radical suffering, pain, or loss, a mode of narrative through which we come to know certain things about ourselves and our world--about its fragility and ours. Through a mixture of historical discussion and close reading of a number of dramatic texts--from Sophocles to Sarah Kane--the book addresses a wide range of debates: how tragedy is defined, whether there is such a thing as "absolute tragedy," various modern attempts to rework the classical heritage and the relation of comedy to tragedy. There is also a fresh discussion of whether religious--particularly Christian--discourse is inimical to the tragic and of the necessary tension between tragic narrative and certain kinds of political as well as religious rhetoric. Rowan Williams argues that tragic drama both articulates failure and frailty and, in affirming the possibility of narrating the story of traumatic loss, refuses to settle for passivity, resignation, or despair. In this sense, it still shows the trace of its ritual and religious roots. And in challenging two-dimensional models of society, power, humanity and human knowing, it remains an intrinsic part of any fully humanist culture.

Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies

Dynamism of Character in Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies PDF Author: Piotr Sadowski
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138467
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The theory considers human behavior in terms of functional equilibrium between the stable properties of the mind, independent from the pressures of the sociocultural environment and the immediate situational context. What we call "character" thus denotes an autonomous configuration of psychological elements, which remains stable despite the changing external circumstances.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art PDF Author: Rhodri Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691246696
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"In this book Rhodri Lewis argues that Shakespeare's tragedies are a series of experiments that attempt to tell the truth about the world as Shakespeare sees it, and to discover how far he can stretch tragic affirmation to accommodate the darker aspects of this vision. Lewis argues that Shakespeare worked hard to develop an understanding of what tragedy might be good for; that this understanding emerged from his engagement with the traditions of tragic writing and theorizing that had gone before him; that he used this understanding to shape his tragic plays as carefully patterned aesthetic wholes; and that Shakespeare's understanding of the tragic has "as little to do with Hegel as it does with the unities of tragic time, place, and action that many of Shakespeare's peers and successors busied themselves abstracting from Aristotle's Poetics." Lewis begins the book by tracing the ideas and practices of tragedy as they were known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the sixteenth century. He then takes a chronological approach to Shakespeare's plays, ultimately seeking to affirm the status of dramatic art in Shakespeare's time as a medium for telling the truth about the human experience in a world that is not fully susceptible to rational analysis"--

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages PDF Author: Tanya Pollard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198793111
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
"The book argues that rediscovered ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on sixteenth-century England's dramatic landscape, not only in academic and aristocratic settings, but also at the heart of the developing commercial theaters."--Introduction, p. 2.

Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination

Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination PDF Author: Stuart Sillars
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107029953
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A fully illustrated study of Shakespeare's awareness of traditions in visual art and their presence in his plays and poems.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438129424
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Presents a collection of critical essays on the works of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes Slaves of Passion

Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes Slaves of Passion PDF Author: Lily Bess Campbell
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category : Emotions
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


O'Neill's Shakespeare

O'Neill's Shakespeare PDF Author: Normand Berlin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472104697
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Reveals unexplored links between Shakespeare's plays and the work of Eugene O'Neill