Shakespeare and the Supernatural PDF Download

Author: Victoria Bladen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526109064
Category : Occultism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This edited collection of twelve essays from an international range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars explores the supernatural in Shakespeare from a variety of perspectives and approaches.

Author: Kristen Poole
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139497650
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.

Author: Neil Forsyth
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446479
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In Shakespeare the Illusionist, Neil Forsyth reviews the history of Shakespeare’s plays on film, using the basic distinction in film tradition between what is owed to Méliès and what to the Lumière brothers. He then tightens his focus on those plays that include some explicit magical or supernatural elements—Puck and the fairies, ghosts and witches, or Prospero’s island, for example—and sets out methodically, but with an easy touch, to review all the films that have adapted those comedies and dramas, into the present day. Forsyth’s aim is not to offer yet another answer as to whether Shakespeare would have written for the screen if he were alive today, but rather to assess what various filmmakers and TV directors have in fact made of the spells, haunts, and apparitions in his plays. From analyzing early camera tricks to assessing contemporary handling of the supernatural, Forsyth reads Shakespeare films for how they use the techniques of moviemaking to address questions of illusion and dramatic influence. In doing so, he presents a bold step forward in Shakespeare and film studies, and his fresh take is presented in lively, accessible language that makes the book ideal for classroom use.

Author: Nandini Das
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317290674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Franklin Watts
ISBN: 9780531057285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Selections of Shakespeare's verse with supernatural themes or subjects, taken from "Macbeth," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and other plays.

Author: Martin Harries
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804736213
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book argues that moments of allusion to the supernatural in Shakespeare are occasions where Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes register the perseverance of haunted structures in modern culture. This "reenchantment," at the heart of modernity and of literary and political works central to our understanding of modernity, is the focus of this book. The author shows that allusion to supernatural moments in Shakespeare ("scare quotes") allows writers to both acknowledge and distance themselves from the supernatural phenomena that challenge their disenchanted understanding of the social world. He also uses these modern appropriations of Shakespeare as provocations to reread some of his works, notably Hamlet and Macbeth. Two pairs of linked chapters form the center of the book. One pair joins a reading of Marx, concentrating on The Eighteenth Brumaire, to Hamlet; the other links a reading of Keynes, focusing on The Economic Consequences of the Peace, to Macbeth. The chapters on Marx and Keynes trace some of the strange circuits of supernatural rhetoric in their work, Marx's use of ghosts and Keynes's fascination with witchcraft. The sequence linking Marx to Hamlet, for example, has as its anchor the Frankfurt School's concept of the phantasmagoria, the notion that it is in the most archaic that one encounters the figure of the new. Looking closely at Marx's association of the Ghost in Hamlet with the coming revolution in turn illuminates Hamlet's association of the Ghost with the supernatural beings many believed haunted mines. An opening chapter discusses Henry Dircks, a nineteenth-century English inventor who developed—and then lost his claim to—a phantasmagoria or machine to project ghosts on stage. Dircks resorted to magical rhetoric in response to his loss, which is emblematic for the book as a whole, charting ways the scare quote can, paradoxically, continue the work of enlightenment.

Author: Gwilym Jones
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526111845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Whether the apocalyptic storm of King Lear or the fleeting thunder imagery of Hamlet, the shipwrecks of the comedies or the thunderbolt of Pericles, there is an instance of storm in every one of Shakespeare’s plays. This is the first comprehensive study of Shakespeare’s storms. With chapters on Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Pericles and The Tempest, the book traces the development of the storm over the second half of the playwright’s career, when Shakespeare took the storm to new extremes. It explains the storm effects used in early modern playhouses, and how they filter into Shakespeare’s dramatic language. Interspersed are chapters on thunder, lightning, wind and rain, in which the author reveals Shakespeare’s meteorological understanding and offers nuanced readings of his imagery. Throughout, Shakespeare’s storms brings theatre history to bear on modern theories of literature and the environment. It is essential reading for anyone interested in early modern drama.

Author: Kenneth Usongo
Publisher: Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780367710934
Category : Supernatural in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Through mainly a New Historicist critical approach, this book explores how Shakespeare and Achebe employ supernatural devices such as prophecies, dreams, gods/goddesses, beliefs, and divinations to create complex characters. Even though these features indicate the preponderance of the belief in the supernatural by some people of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and traditional Igbo societies, Shakespeare and Achebe primarily use the supernatural to represent the states of mind of their protagonists. Both writers appropriate supernatural features to mirror tragic flaws such as ambition, arrogance, impulsiveness, and fear that contribute to the downfall of Macbeth, Lear, Okonkwo, and Ezeulu. We relate to some of these characters because they project our inner minds, principal drives that may be hidden within us. Therefore, Shakespeare and Achebe's preoccupation with the supernatural adds subtlety to their characterization and enhances their readability by situating their art beyond time, place, or particularity.

Author: Garry Wills
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195102908
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book reinterprets Macbeth by returning it to the context of its own time, recreating the theological and political crises of Shakespeare's era.

Author: Lori Handeland
Publisher: Lori Handeland
ISBN: 0997132442
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
A fun-filled fantasy romp through Elizabethan England . . . It has been said that one man could not possibly have created all the works attributed to William Shakespeare. However, what if Shakespeare was not a man? What if Shakespeare was an immortal vampire? What if the Dark Lady of his sonnets was a zombie hunter? What if they met, fell in love, thwarted evil together . . .