Elizabethan Comedies

Author : Dover Publications, Inc.
Publisher : Courier Dover Publications
ISBN 13 : 0486816060
Total Pages : 451 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Elizabethan Comedies written by Dover Publications, Inc. and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2017-12-13 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and vital form of drama blossomed in 16th-century England, blending classic Latin comedy traditions with keen satires of contemporary London life. Although Shakespeare remains the most recognizable playwright of the Elizabethan age, there were many others whose work continues to entertain and educate students of drama to this day. This anthology collects timeless comedies that both informed Shakespeare's work and took inspiration from the Bard himself. Six plays include Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, the comedy that made the author's reputation; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay by Robert Greene, a groundbreaking play in terms of multiple-plot structure; The Shoemaker's Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker, the "Dickens of English theater"; All Fools, George Chapman's sprightly romp; A Trick to Catch the Old One by Thomas Middleton, one of the era's most prolific and successful playwrights; and Eastward Ho!, a collaborative work by Chapman, Jonson, and John Marston.

Author : Alexander Leggatt
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521779425
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy written by Alexander Leggatt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.

Author : Penny Gay
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139469770
Total Pages : 197 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Comedies written by Penny Gay and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did theatre audiences laugh in Shakespeare's day? Why do they still laugh now? What did Shakespeare do with the conventions of comedy that he inherited, so that his plays continue to amuse and move audiences? What do his comedies have to say about love, sex, gender, power, family, community, and class? What place have pain, cruelty, and even death in a comedy? Why all those puns? In a survey that travels from Shakespeare's earliest experiments in farce and courtly love-stories to the great romantic comedies of his middle years and the mould-breaking experiments of his last decade's work, this book addresses these vital questions. Organised thematically, and covering all Shakespeare's comedies from the beginning to the end of his career, it provides readers with a map of the playwright's comic styles, showing how he built on comedic conventions as he further enriched the possibilities of the genre.

Author : Elissa Hare
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315305895
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Enchanted Shows written by Elissa Hare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book, first published in 1988, examines the role of magic in Elizabethan and Shakespearean theatre. The author observes how certain plays, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, rationalise the unrealism and improbabilities typical of romantic comedy as miracles wrought by specifically magical intervention. The author also explores the ways in which playwrights justify structural discontinuity by the working of magic. This title will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

Author : Linda Anderson
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
ISBN 13 : 9780874133196
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.9X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Kind of Wild Justice written by Linda Anderson and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study demonstrates not only that the devices of revenge are structurally useful in comedy, but also that there is a consistent conception of revenge as an ethical social instrument in the comedies of Shakespeare.

Author : John Pendergast
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1440857490
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare's World: The Comedies written by John Pendergast and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With summaries, discussions, and excerpts from primary source documents, this book examines Shakespeare's world through careful consideration of the historical background of four of his comedies. Comedy was popular during the Renaissance, and it was also one of Shakespeare's specialties. The four plays discussed in this book, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and The Tempest, span Shakespeare's career and remind us that Shakespeare, more than any of his contemporaries, explored the possibilities of comedy, consistently developing new approaches to the genre. Shakespeare was a fairly traditional playwright, well aware of the long tradition of comedy, which dates back to the Greeks and Romans. This book places Shakespeare's comedies in their historical context. It includes dedicated chapters on each of the four comedies, with each chapter providing a plot summary, a discussion of the play's historical background and significance, and excerpts from primary source documents related to the play. An introduction surveys the historical background of the plays, while a timeline chronicles key events that influenced them. Suggestions for further reading direct readers to additional sources of information.

Author : Kiernan Ryan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1137075104
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare's Comedies written by Kiernan Ryan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book one of the most original and compelling voices in contemporary Shakespeare criticism undertakes a detailed study of the ten extraordinary comedies Shakespeare wrote during his first decade as a dramatist: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Through close readings of these plays Kiernan Ryan reveals Shakespeare's deepening disenchantment with his world and his dream of that world transfigured. Ryan engages with each comedy as a unique work of dramatic and poetic art, with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, paying special attention to its language and form. As the haunting vision shared by the plays emerges from Ryan's acute analysis of each of them, the book transforms our understanding and appreciation of Shakespearean comedy. Written in a lively, accessible style, Shakespeare's Comedies is essential reading not only for students and teachers, but also for anyone keen to consider these plays from a fresh perspective.

Author : Larry S. Champion
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674271418
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy written by Larry S. Champion and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of Shakespeare's comedy, in Larry Champion's view, is apparent in the expansion of his comic vision to include a complete reflection of human life while maintaining a comic detachment for the audience. Like the other popular dramatists of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare used the diverse comic motifs and devices which time and custom had proved effective. He went further, however, and created progressively deeper levels of characterization and plot interaction, thereby forming characters who were not merely devices subordinated to the needs of the plot. Shakespeare's development as a comic playwright, suggests Champion, was "consistently in the direction of complexity or depth of characterization." His earliest works, like those of his contemporaries, are essentially situation comedies: the humor arises from action rather than character. There is no significant development of the main characters; instead, they are manipulated into situations which are humorous as a result, for example, of mistaken identity or slapstick confusion. The ensuing phase of Shakespeare's comedy sets forth plots in which the emphasis is on identity rather than physical action, a revelation of character which occurs in one of two forms: either a hypocrite is exposed for what he actually is or a character who has assumed an unnatural or abnormal pose is forced to realize and admit the ridiculousness of his position. In the final comedies involving sin and sacrificial forgiveness, however, character development is concerned with a "transformation of values." Although each of the comedies is discussed, Champion concentrates on nine, dividing them according to the complexity of characterization. He pursues as well the playwright's efforts to achieve for the spectator the detached stance so vital to comedy. Shakespeare obtained this perspective, Champion observes, through experimentation with the use of material mirroring the main action--mockery, parody, or caricature--and through the use of a "comic pointer" who is himself involved in the action but is sufficiently independent of the other characters to provide the audience with an omniscient view.

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 94 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Comedy of Errors written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : G. Beiner
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 9780838634677
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare's Agonistic Comedy written by G. Beiner and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As the poetics is based on the texts (not derived by deduction or theoretical extension from some principle of poetics), so it is applied as a tool of analysis to the texts and used in conjunction with evaluation. The underlying assumption is that the task of poetics is instrumental, and that its usefulness has to be demonstrated and verified in practice. Hence, the division of the book into two parts. As Part I formulates a poetics on the basis of the texts, so Part II applies the poetics to the major texts - always within the dynamics of the multiple-plot and multi-layered perspective on a play. Part II focuses in detail on The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night, analyzing the agons and placing them in relation to the comedy of love and the perspective of folly."--Jacket.