Author: Robert Witbeck BabcockPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Book Description
The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry
Author: Robert Witbeck BabcockPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Book Description
The Genesis of Shakespeare Idolatry, 1766-1799
Author: Robert Witbeck BabcockPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
The Re-Imagined Text
Author: Jean I. MarsdenPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813185556
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
Shakespeare's plays were not always the inviolable texts they are almost universally considered to be today. The Restoration and eighteenth century committed what many critics view as one of the most subversive acts in literary history—the rewriting and restructuring of Shakespeare's plays. Many of us are familiar with Nahum Tate's "audacious" adaptation of King Lear with its resoundingly happy ending, but Tate was only one of a score of playwrights who adapted Shakespeare's plays. Between 1660 and 1777, more than fifty adaptations appeared in print and on the stage, works in which playwrights augmented, substantially cut, or completely rewrote the original plays. The plays were staged with new characters, new scenes, new endings, and, underlying all this novelty, new words. Why did this happen? And why, in the later eighteenth century, did it stop? These questions have serious implications regarding both the aesthetics of the literary text and its treatment, for the adaptations manifest the period's perceptions of Shakespeare. As such, they demonstrate an important evolution in the definition of poetic language, and in the idea of what constitutes a literary work. In The Re-Imagined Text, Jean I. Marsden examines both the adaptations and the network of literary theory that surrounds them, thereby exploring the problems of textual sanctity and of the author's relationship to the text. As she demonstrates, Shakespeare's works, and English literature in general, came to be defined by their words rather than by the plots and morality on which the older aesthetic theory focused—a clear step toward our modern concern for the word and its varying levels of signification.
Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Author: Kate RumboldPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107132401
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
Explores the significant presence of Shakespeare in major novels of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare
Author: Charles LaPortePublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108853463
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Book Description
In the Victorian era, William Shakespeare's work was often celebrated as a sacred text: a sort of secular English Bible. Even today, Shakespeare remains a uniquely important literary figure. Yet Victorian criticism took on religious dimensions that now seem outlandish in retrospect. Ministers wrote sermons based upon Shakespearean texts and delivered them from pulpits in Christian churches. Some scholars crafted devotional volumes to compare his texts directly with the Bible's. Still others created Shakespearean societies in the faith that his inspiration was not like that of other playwrights. Charles LaPorte uses such examples from the Victorian cult of Shakespeare to illustrate the complex relationship between religion, literature and secularization. His work helps to illuminate a curious but crucial chapter in the history of modern literary studies in the West, as well as its connections with Biblical scholarship and textual criticism.
The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare
Author: P. DavidhaziPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230372120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Focusing on England, Hungary and on some other European countries, the book explores the latent religious patterns in the appropriation of Shakespeare from the 1769 Stratford Jubilee to the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth in 1864. It shows how the Shakespeare cult used quasi-religious (verbal and ritual) means of reverence, how it made use of some romantic notions, and how the ensuing quasi-transcendental authority was utilized for political purposes. The book suggests a theoretical framework and a comprehensive anthropological context for the interpretation of literature.
The Great White Bard
Author: Farah Karim-CooperPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593489373
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking how is Shakespeare still relevant? Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his pedestal to unveil a Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in famous plays from Antony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard asks us neither to idealize nor bury Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. In inviting new perspectives and interpretations, we may yet prolong and enrich his extraordinary legacy.
Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism
Author: Joseph M. OrtizPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135190079X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 476
Book Description
The idea of Shakespearean genius and sublimity is usually understood to be a product of the Romantic period, promulgated by poets such as Coleridge and Byron who promoted Shakespeare as the supreme example of literary genius and creative imagination. However, the picture looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the myriad theater directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century who turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests. Often, as in John Kemble’s staging of The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane or John Boydell’s marketing of paintings in his Shakespeare Gallery, Shakespeare provided a literal platform on which both artists and entrepreneurs could strive to influence cultural tastes and points of view. At other times, Romantic writers found in Shakespeare’s works a set of rhetorical and theatrical tools through which to form their own public personae, both poetic and political. Women writers in particular often adapted Shakespeare to express their own political and social concerns. Taken together, all of these critical and aesthetic responses attest to the remarkable malleability of the Shakespearean corpus in the Romantic period. As the contributors show, Romantic writers of all persuasions”Whig and Tory, male and female, intellectual and commercial”found in Shakespeare a powerful medium through which to claim authority for their particular interests.
The Making of the National Poet : Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769
Author: Michael DobsonPublisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191591718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
The first full-length study since the 1920s of the Restoration and eighteenth-century's revisions and revaluations of Shakespeare, and the first to consider the period's much-reviled stage adaptions in the context of the profound cultural changes of their times. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Dobson examines how and why Shakespeare was retrospectively claimed as both a respectable Enlightenment author and a crucial and contested symbol of British national identity. The book provides thorough analysis, both engaging and informative, the definitive account of the theatre's role in establishing Shakespeare as Britain's National Poet. - ;The century between the Restoration and David Garrick's Stratford Jubilee saw William Shakespeare's promotion from the status of archaic, rustic playwright to that of England's timeless Bard, and with it the complete transformation of the ways in which his plays were staged, published, and read. But why Shakespeare, and what different interests did this process serve? The Making of the National Poet is the first full-length study since the 1920s of the Restoration and eighteenth century's revisions and revaluations of Shakespeare, and the first to consider the period's much-reviled stage adaptations in the context of the profound cultural changes in which they participate. Drawing on a wide range of evidence - including engravings, prompt-books, diaries, statuary, and previously unpublished poems (among them traces of the hitherto mysterious Shakespeare Ladies' Club) - it examines how and why Shakespeare was retrospectively claimed as both a respectable Enlightenment author and a crucial and contested symbol of British national identity. It shows in particular how the deification of Shakespeare co-existed with, and even demanded, the drastic and sometimes bizarre rewriting of his plays for which the period is notorious. The book provides thorough analysis, both engaging and informative, the definitive account of the theatre's role in establishing Shakespeare as Britain's National Poet. -
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy
Author: Michael NeillPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198724195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 993
Book Description
This handbook brings together 54 essays by scholars from all parts of the world. It offers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts, written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor.