Shakespeare's Tragic Practice

Shakespeare's Tragic Practice PDF Author: Bertrand Evans
Publisher: Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description

Shakespeare's Tragic Practice

Shakespeare's Tragic Practice PDF Author: Bertrand Evans
Publisher: Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description


Shakespeare and Tragedy

Shakespeare and Tragedy PDF Author: John Bayley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000350444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
Every generation develops its own approach to tragedy, attitudes successively influenced by such classic works as A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy and the studies in interpretation by G. Wilson Knight. A comprehensive new book on the subject by an author of the same calibre was long overdue. In his book, originally published in 1981, John Bayley discusses the Roman plays, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens as well as the four major tragedies. He shows how Shakespeare’s most successful tragic effects hinge on an opposition between the discourses of character and form, role and context. For example, in Lear the dramatis personae act in the dramatic world of tragedy which demands universality and high rhetoric of them. Yet they are human and have their being in the prosaic world of domesticity and plain speaking. The inevitable intrusion of the human world into the world of tragedy creates the play’s powerful off-key effects. Similarly, the existential crisis in Macbeth can be understood in terms of the tension between accomplished action and the free-ranging domain of consciousness. What is the relation between being and acting? How does an audience become intimate with a protagonist who is alienated from his own play? What did Shakespeare add to the form and traditions of tragedy? Do his masterpieces in the genre disturb and transform it in unexpected ways? These are the issues raised by this lucid and imaginative study. Professor Bayley’s highly original rethinking of the problems will be a challenge to the Shakespearean scholar as well as an illumination to the general reader.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy PDF Author: Claire McEachern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521793599
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
Acquaints the student reader with the forms, contexts, and critical and theatrical lives of the ten plays considered to be Shakespeare's tragedies. Shakespearean tragedy is a highly complex and demanding theatre genre, but the thirteen essays, written by leading scholars in Britain and North America, are clear, concise and informative.

Shakespeare's Tragic Justice

Shakespeare's Tragic Justice PDF Author: C. J. Sisson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315306379
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 107

Get Book Here

Book Description
The problem of justice seems to have haunted Shakespeare as it haunted Renaissance Christendom. In this book, first published in 1963, four aspects of the problems of justice in action in Shakespeare’s great tragedies are explored. This study is based on the lifetime’s research of Elizabethan habits of mind by one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars, and will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

Shakespeare's Tragedies and Modern Critical Theory

Shakespeare's Tragedies and Modern Critical Theory PDF Author: James Cunningham
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838637111
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Individual chapters deal with cultural materialism, new historicism, poststructuralism, and feminist criticism. The theoretical basis of each critical mode is examined and some representative critiques analyzed. Most importantly, in each chapter the various interpretations are tested against Shakespeare's texts, and the strengths and weaknesses of the different readings are assessed.

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art PDF Author: Rhodri Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691246718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new account of Shakespearean tragedy as a response to life in an uncertain world In Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, Rhodri Lewis offers a powerfully original reassessment of tragedy as Shakespeare wrote it—of what drew him toward tragic drama, what makes his tragedies distinctive, and why they matter. After reconstructing tragic theory and practice as Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew them, Lewis considers in detail each of Shakespeare’s tragedies from Titus Andronicus to Coriolanus. He argues that these plays are a series of experiments whose greatness lies in their author’s nerve-straining determination to represent the experience of living in a world that eludes rational analysis. They explore not just our inability to know ourselves as we would like to, but the compensatory and generally unacknowledged fictions to which we bind ourselves in our hunger for meaning—from the political, philosophical, social, and religious to the racial, sexual, personal, and familial. Lewis’s Shakespeare not only creates tragedies that exceed those written before them. Through his art, he also affirms and invigorates the kinds of knowing that are available to intelligent animals like us. A major reevaluation of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Shakespeare’s Tragic Art is essential reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare, tragedy, or the capacity of literature to help us navigate the perplexities of the human condition.

Shakespeare's Tragic Form

Shakespeare's Tragic Form PDF Author: Robert Lanier Reid
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137255
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since about 1960, when five-act division in Shakespeare's plays was strongly disputed, most critics have focused on individual scenes rather than holistic form. This book argues for Shakespeare's use of five acts, arranged in three cycles to form a 2-1-2 pattern. It also examines the role of multiple plots and centers of consciousness, especially in the festive comedies and romances. Additionally, it traces Shakespeare's gradual mastery of the art of epiphany, compares it to Spenser's complementary focus on transcendent reality, and traces in Macbeth the dark mode of Shakespeare's dramaturgical pattern.

Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism

Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism PDF Author: Millicent Bell
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300127200
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
Readers of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies have long noted the absence of readily explainable motivations for some of Shakespeare’s greatest characters: why does Hamlet delay his revenge for so long? Why does King Lear choose to renounce his power? Why is Othello so vulnerable to Iago’s malice? But while many critics have chosen to overlook these omissions or explain them away, Millicent Bell demonstrates that they are essential elements of Shakespeare’s philosophy of doubt. Examining the major tragedies, Millicent Bell reveals the persistent strain of philosophical skepticism. Like his contemporary, Montaigne, Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the essential unknowability of our world. In a period of social, political, and religious upheaval, uncertainty hovered over matters great and small—the succession of the crown, the death of loved ones from plague, the failure of a harvest. Tumultuous social conditions raised ultimate questions for Shakespeare, Bell argues, and ultimately provoked in him a skepticism which casts shadows of existential doubt over his greatest masterpieces.

Shakespearean Tragedy

Shakespearean Tragedy PDF Author: John Drakakis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131789989X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.

Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy

Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy PDF Author: Naomi Conn Liebler
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415086578
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
A unique look at the social and religious foundations of the tragic genre. Liebler asks whether it is possible to regard tragic heroes such as Lear and Coriolanus as `sacrificial victims of the prevailing social order'.