Author: Robert KimbroughPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Shakespeare and the Art of Humankindness
Author: Robert KimbroughPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox
Author: Peter G. PlattPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317056523
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Exploring Shakespeare's intellectual interest in placing both characters and audiences in a state of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, this book interrogates the use of paradox in Shakespeare's plays and in performance. By adopting this discourse-one in which opposites can co-exist and perspectives can be altered, and one that asks accepted opinions, beliefs, and truths to be reconsidered-Shakespeare used paradox to question love, gender, knowledge, and truth from multiple perspectives. Committed to situating literature within the larger culture, Peter Platt begins by examining the Renaissance culture of paradox in both the classical and Christian traditions. He then looks at selected plays in terms of paradox, including the geographical site of Venice in Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and equity law in The Comedy of Errors, Merchant, and Measure for Measure. Platt also considers the paradoxes of theater and live performance that were central to Shakespearean drama, such as the duality of the player, the boy-actor and gender, and the play/audience relationship in the Henriad, Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. In showing that Shakespeare's plays create and are created by a culture of paradox, Platt offers an exciting and innovative investigation of Shakespeare's cognitive and affective power over his audience.
Of Human Kindness
Author: Paula Marantz CohenPublisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172
Book Description
An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.
Reading Shakespeare on Stage
Author: Herbert R. CoursenPublisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874135381
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Book Description
"Reading Shakespeare on Stage offers a straightforward set of criteria whereby anyone, from the first-time playgoer to the most experienced Shakespearean scholar, may evaluate his or her response to a production of one of Shakespeare's scripts. This articulation of response is not a by-product of going to the theater, but a central part of the experience. The "invitation to response" is a function of Shakespeare's stage, which was open to the audience on three sides, and is incorporated into his scripts through soliloquies, asides, and references to Shakespeare's stage and his dramaturgy." "The concept of "script" (as opposed to "text") makes possible an approach to Shakespeare's plays as plays, a function to which their literary quality is subordinate. That fact, however, does not mean that recent critical tendencies are irrelevant to the scripts. Feminist and historicist readings of the plays are "contextualized" in and by the ongoing energy system of production. It remains true, however, that many members of the growing audience for live performances can not determine what may have been strong or weak about a given production. The size and shape of the stage and the size of the auditorium, for example, define what can occur within the given space, but few spectators take that crucial factor into account. Reading Shakespeare on Stage provides the criteria for evaluation, while at the same time admitting that the criteria themselves are subject to debate and that their application emerges from the subjective psychology of perception of individual spectators."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Shakespeare's 'Whores'
Author: K. StantonPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137026332
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
Book Description
Shakespeare's 'Whores' studies each use of the word 'whore' in Shakespeare's canon, focusing especially on the positive personal and social effects of female sexuality, as represented in several major female characters, from the goddess Venus, to the queen Cleopatra, to the cross-dressing Rosalind, and many others.
Shakespeare’s As You Like It
Author: M. HuntPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
This book is a study of As You Like It , which shows how the play represents issues of interest to literate playgoers of its time, as well as speculatively to Shakespeare himself.
Shakespeare's Politics
Author: Robin Headlam WellsPublisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826493068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
An introduction to the political and historical context to Shakespeare's tragedy and history plays, written in an accessible, jargon-free style.
The Works of Shakespeare ....: Macbeth, ed. by H. Cuningham
Author: William ShakespeareShakespeare’s Imagined Persons
Author: P. MurrayPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230376754
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Book Description
Challenging our understanding of ideas about psychology in Shakespeare's time, Shakespeare's Imagined Persons proposes we should view his characters as imagined persons. A new reading of B.F. Skinner's radical behaviourism brings out how - contrary to the impression he created - Skinner ascribes an important role in human behaviour to cognitive activity. Using this analysis, Peter Murray demonstrates the consistency of radical behaviourism with the psychology of character formation and acting in writers from Plato to Shakespeare - an approach little explored in the current debates about subjectivity in Elizabethan culture. Murray also shows that radical behaviourism can explain the phenomena observed in modern studies of acting and social role-playing. Drawing on these analyses of earlier and modern psychology, Murray goes on to reveal the dynamics of Shakespeare's characterizations of Hamlet, Prince Hal, Rosalind, and Perdita in a fascinating new light.
Author: William Shakespeare