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Author: Stephen Greenblatt Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393635767 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
"Brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable." —Philip Roth World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright’s insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. Examining the psyche—and psychoses—of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus, Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the disasters visited upon the societies over which these characters rule. Tyrant shows that Shakespeare’s work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge their appetites.
Author: Stephen Greenblatt Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393635767 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
"Brilliant, beautifully organized, exceedingly readable." —Philip Roth World-renowned Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores the playwright’s insight into bad (and often mad) rulers. Examining the psyche—and psychoses—of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus, Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the disasters visited upon the societies over which these characters rule. Tyrant shows that Shakespeare’s work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge their appetites.
Author: Mary Ann McGrail Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 9780739104781 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Even the most explicitly political contemporary approaches to Shakespeare have been uninterested by his tyrants as such. But for Shakespeare, rather than a historical curiosity or psychological aberration, tyranny is a perpetual political and human problem. Mary Ann McGrail's recovery of the playwright's perspective challenges the grounds of this modern critical silence. She locates Shakespeare's expansive definition of tyranny between the definitions accepted by classical and modern political philosophy. Is tyranny always the worst of all possible political regimes, as Aristotle argues in his Politics? Or is disguised tyranny, as Machiavelli proposes, potentially the best regime possible? These competing conceptions were practiced and debated in Renaissance thought, given expression by such political actors and thinkers as Elizabeth I, James I, Henrie Bullinger, Bodin, and others. McGrail focuses on Shakespeare's exploration of the conflicting and contradictory passions that make up the tyrant and finds that Shakespeare's dramas of tyranny rest somewhere between Aristotle's reticence and Machiavelli's forthrightness. Literature and politics intersect in Tyranny in Shakespeare, which will fascinate students and scholars of both.
Author: Stephen Greenblatt Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393079848 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
Named One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, reissued with a new afterword for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A young man from a small provincial town moves to London in the late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? Stephen Greenblatt brings us down to earth to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life, could have become the world’s greatest playwright.
Author: Stephen Greenblatt Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226306682 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 163
Book Description
Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers. Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained. A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.
Author: Stephen Greenblatt Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400848091 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false "poem," they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly "prison house of souls" had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition. With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost. This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers. This expanded Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.
Author: James Shapiro Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0525522298 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.
Author: Peter Lake Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300222718 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 683
Book Description
The politics of virtue -- Honour and its enemies: women on top - again -- Anti-popery -- Divided we fall: the politics of faction in time of war -- CHAPTER 6 Richard III: political ends, providential means -- The making of a Machiavel -- Monstrous bodies and providential signs -- Signs and prophecies -- The audience as 'high all- seer' -- Ambiguities of 'evil counsel' -- From providence to predestination: the return of legitimacy -- Richard III as a guide to the past, present and future -- CHAPTER 7 Going Roman: Richard III and Titus Andronicus compared
Author: Stephen Greenblatt Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136774203 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Stephen Greenblatt argued in these celebrated essays that the art of the Renaissance could only be understood in the context of the society from which it sprang. His approach - 'New Historicism' - drew from history, anthropology, Marxist theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis and in the process, blew apart the academic boundaries insulating literature from the world around it. Learning to Curse charts the evolution of that approach and provides a vivid and compelling exploration of a complex and contradictory epoch.
Author: Clare Asquith Publisher: PublicAffairs ISBN: 1568588119 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
Shakespeare's largely misunderstood narrative poems contain within them an explosive commentary on the political storms convulsing his country The 1590s were bleak years for England. The queen was old, the succession unclear, and the treasury empty after decades of war. Amid the rising tension, William Shakespeare published a pair of poems dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton: Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece a year later. Although wildly popular during Shakespeare's lifetime, to modern readers both works are almost impenetrable. But in her enthralling new book, the Shakespearean scholar Clare Asquith reveals their hidden contents: two politically charged allegories of Tudor tyranny that justified-and even urged-direct action against an unpopular regime. The poems were Shakespeare's bestselling works in his lifetime, evidence that they spoke clearly to England's wounded populace and disaffected nobility, and especially to their champion, the Earl of Essex. Shakespeare and the Resistance unearths Shakespeare's own analysis of a political and religious crisis which would shortly erupt in armed rebellion on the streets of London. Using the latest historical research, it resurrects the story of a bold bid for freedom of conscience and an end to corruption that was erased from history by the men who suppressed it. This compelling reading situates Shakespeare at the heart of the resistance movement.
Author: Paul A. Cantor Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022646251X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare’s Roman plays—Coriolanus, Julius Caeser, and Antony and Cleopatra—in his landmark Shakespeare’s Rome (1976). With Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an integrated trilogy that portrays the tragedy not simply of their protagonists but of an entire political community. Cantor analyzes the way Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. The transformation of the ancient city into a cosmopolitan empire marks the end of the era of civic virtue in antiquity, but it also opens up new spiritual possibilities that Shakespeare correlates with the rise of Christianity and thus the first stirrings of the medieval and the modern worlds. More broadly, Cantor places Shakespeare’s plays in a long tradition of philosophical speculation about Rome, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two thinkers who provide important clues on how to read Shakespeare’s works. In a pathbreaking chapter, he undertakes the first systematic comparison of Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome, exploring their central point of contention: Did Christianity corrupt the Roman Empire or was the corruption of the Empire the precondition of the rise of Christianity? Bringing Shakespeare into dialogue with other major thinkers about Rome, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy reveals the true profundity of the Roman Plays.
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Author: Mary Ann McGrail
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Author: James Shapiro
Author: Peter Lake
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Author: Clare Asquith
Author: Paul A. Cantor