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Author: John Vyvyan Publisher: Shepheard-Walwyn ISBN: 0856834084 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 137
Book Description
Looking at some of the Shakespearean comedies, author John Vyvyan suggests they express a consistent, profoundly Christian philosophy of life based on the Platonic ideas of beauty and love. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and All’s Well That Ends Well, the heroines bring to life the idea of love as the force that is awakened in the world by beauty which then leads the soul to perfection. Vyvyan believes that for Shakespeare, love was preeminent over human ideas of justice, that self-discovery was a supreme human experience, and that breaking faith with the ideal—as Agamemnon, Cressida, and Hector all do in Troilus and Cressida —sowed the seeds of tragedy. The author’s recognition of Shakespeare's use of allegory enables him to make sense of certain developments in these plays that seem weak or absurd from the psychological standpoint. He does not suggest that Shakespeare’s philosophy is the most important thing about his plays; it is simply one thing about them that ought to be known. The recognition of this philosophy enhances enjoyment of the plays, giving them a new dimension and richness. This edition contains a list of the author’s Shakespearean references and an enhanced index.
Author: John Vyvyan Publisher: Shepheard-Walwyn ISBN: 0856834084 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 137
Book Description
Looking at some of the Shakespearean comedies, author John Vyvyan suggests they express a consistent, profoundly Christian philosophy of life based on the Platonic ideas of beauty and love. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and All’s Well That Ends Well, the heroines bring to life the idea of love as the force that is awakened in the world by beauty which then leads the soul to perfection. Vyvyan believes that for Shakespeare, love was preeminent over human ideas of justice, that self-discovery was a supreme human experience, and that breaking faith with the ideal—as Agamemnon, Cressida, and Hector all do in Troilus and Cressida —sowed the seeds of tragedy. The author’s recognition of Shakespeare's use of allegory enables him to make sense of certain developments in these plays that seem weak or absurd from the psychological standpoint. He does not suggest that Shakespeare’s philosophy is the most important thing about his plays; it is simply one thing about them that ought to be known. The recognition of this philosophy enhances enjoyment of the plays, giving them a new dimension and richness. This edition contains a list of the author’s Shakespearean references and an enhanced index.
Author: Hugh Grady Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521514754 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
This book examines Shakespeare's plays and defines specific Shakespearean aesthetic practices in his use of desire, death and mourning.
Author: Jill Line Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co ISBN: 9781594771453 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
Reveals the influence of the Renaissance scholar-priest Marsilio Ficino on Shakespeare and how the Neoplatonic philosophy of love shaped the inner meaning of his work • Shows how Shakespeare’s works offer a path back to the divine unity of all things • Explains the role of love in the Christian-Platonic concept of the three worlds In Love’s Labours Lost, Shakespeare talks of the true Promethean fire that is lit by the doctrine he reads in women’s eyes. What is this doctrine and what is this true Promethean fire to which it gives birth? In Shakespeare and the Ideal of Love, Jill Line shows that Shakespeare shared the perennial philosophy of a long line of teachers, including Hermes Tristmegistus, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, and especially the Florentine scholar and mystic Marsilio Ficino. The answer to these questions, Line claims, lies in Ficino’s Christian-Platonic philosophy of love, from which all Shakespeare’s plays have their genesis. Love, according to Ficino, is the force that inspired the creation of the worlds of the angelic mind, the soul, and the material, and it is through love that each of these worlds expands into the next. Love is also the vehicle that allows human beings to make the return journey to the source of their being, where they find unity in God. This is the path on which all of Shakespeare’s lovers embark. Jill Line explains how Shakespeare’s plays represent more than poetic literary constructs: They are mirrors of the progress of the soul, in many conditions and situations, as it returns to the divine unity of all things.
Author: Stephen Orgel Publisher: Courier Corporation ISBN: 9780815329671 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
Shakespeare has never been more ubiquitous, not only on the stage and in academic writing, but in film, video and the popular press. On television, he advertises everything from cars to fast food. His birthplace, the tiny Warwickshire village of Stratford-Upon-Avon, has been transformed into a theme park of staggering commercialism, and the New Globe, in its second season, is already a far bigger business than the old Globe could ever have hoped to be. If popular culture cannot do without Shakespeare, continually reinventing him and reimagining his drama and his life, neither can the critical and scholarly world, for which Shakespeare has, for more than two centuries, served as the central text for analysis and explication, the foundation of the western literary canon and the measure of literary excellence.The Shakespeare the essays collected in these volumes reveal is fully as multifarious as the Shakespeare of theme parks, movies and television. Indeed, it is part of the continuing reinvention of Shakespeare. The essays are drawn for the most part from work done in the past three decades, though a few essential, enabling essays from an earlier period have been included. They not only chart the directions taken by Shakespeare studies in the recent past, but they serve to indicate the enormous and continuing vitality of the enterprise, and the extent to which Shakespeare has become a metonym for literary and artistic endeavor generally.
Author: Lewis Walker Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317943376 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 920
Book Description
This bibliography will give comprehensive coverage to published commentary in English on Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition during the period from 1961-1985. Doctoral dissertations will also be included. Each entry will provide a clear and detailed summary of an item's contents. For pomes and plays based directly on classical sources like Antony and Cleopatra and The Rape of Lucrece, virtually all significant scholarly work during the period covered will be annotated. For other works such as Hamlet, any scholarship that deals with classical connotations will be annotated. Any other bibliographies used in the compiling of this volume will be described with emphasis on their value to a student of Shakespeare and the Classics.
Author: John Vyvyan Publisher: Shepheard Walwyn (Publishers) ISBN: 085683405X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 133
Book Description
Originally published by Chatto & Windus in 1960 as the second volume in a trilogy, this book has long been out of print. It offers a viewpoint seldom considered: an unusual and exceptionally clear insight into Shakespeare's philosophy. It does so with freshness, modesty and conviction. John Vyvyan continues his exploration into Shakespeare's philosophy, begun in The Shakespearean Ethic, which he believes to have been consistent, consciously held and profoundly Christian. However, appreciating the danger faced in writing at a time of major religious intolerance, for 'by the orthodox standards of his age, [such a] philosophy was heretical', Vyvyan explains how Shakespeare used the medieval allegory of love, The Romance of the Rose, to veil his ideas. The ultimate principle of his unorthodoxy, Vyvyan points out, was not original. It was one that had 'been getting the mystics into trouble repeatedly since the early Middle Ages. Shakespeare's view, that love leads to the recognition of unity, in essence is a poet's presentation of the doctrine of divine immanence. This is something the mystics are continually reasserting'. In The Romance of the Rose, the heroine symbolises the highest form of Love, not just romance, but also the qualities of purity and constancy, as Vyvyan reveals by discussing at length Love's Labour's Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. He shows that, even in his earliest work, Shakespeare was moving towards the universal ideas of love, forgiveness and regeneration which found their fullest expression in The Tempest and A Winter's Tale. 'There is no other voice from the past', Vyvyan writes, 'to which we still listen so willingly; and this is not merely because he entertains us, even in the higher sense, but also because there is something in his outlook on life that is deeply satisfying.' Author Details: John Vyvyan, born in 1908 in Sussex, was educated mainly in Switzerland. His first profession was archaeology, and he worked with Sir Flinders Petrie in the Middle East. Illness, which dogged him all his life, ended this kind of arduous field work, and he retired from archaeology to become a Shakespearean scholar and to write. In recognition of his contribution to Shakespearean scholarship in his trilogy, The Shakespearean Ethic (1959), Shakespeare and the Rose of Love (1960) and Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty (1961), he was offered, but unable to take up, a visiting lectureship at the State University of New York. He died in Exmouth in 1975.
Author: M. Fike Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230618553 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
Employing the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, Matthew A. Fike provides a fresh understanding of individuation in Shakespeare. This study of "the visionary mode" - Jung s term for literature that comes through the artist from the collective unconscious - combines a strong grounding in Jungian terminology and theory with myth criticism, biblical literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Fike draws extensively on the rich discussions in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung to illuminate selected plays such as A Midsummer Night s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Henriad, Othello, and Hamlet in new and surprising ways. Fike s clear and thorough approach to Shakespeare offers exciting, original scholarship that will appeal to students and scholars alike.
Author: John Vyvyan
Author: John Vyvyan
Author: Hugh Grady
Author: William Francis C. Wigston
Author: Jill Line
Author: Stephen Orgel
Author: Charles R. Lyons
Author: Lewis Walker
Author: Stanley Wells
Author: John Vyvyan
Author: M. Fike