Shakespeares Comic Commonwealths

Author : Camille Wells Slights
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 9780802029249
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths written by Camille Wells Slights and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the traditional view that Shakespeare's early comedies are about the experience of romantic love and constitute a genre called romantic comedy, Camille Wells Slights demonstrates that they dramatize individual action in the context of social dynamics, reflecting and commenting on the culture in which they originated. Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths sheds new light on ten Shakespearean comedies: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor'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. In a diversity of comic forms - from rollicking farce to tragicomedy - these plays offer varying perspectives on the forces that make and mar human communities. Dramatizing tensions between savagery and civilization, autonomy and dependence, and isolation and community, Shakespeare's comedies both reflect and comment on the society that produces them. Slights eschews viewing these comedies as endorsements of the prevailing ideologies of sixteenth-century England or as subversions of that hierarchical, patriarchal culture. They can be most fruitfully understood as imaginative forms that present cultural practices, institutions and beliefs as human constructions susceptible to critical scrutiny. While exposing the injustice and brutality as well as the assurances and satisfactions of social experiences, Shakespeare's comedies represent people as inescapably social beings. By combining historical scholarship with formal analysis and incorporating insights from social anthropology and feminist theory, Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths offers new readings of Shakespeare's early comedies and analyses the interaction between the plays and the social structures and processes of early modern England.

Author : John Albert Murley
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 9780739116845
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Perspectives on Politics in Shakespeare written by John Albert Murley and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows us that Shakespeare's poetic imagination displays the essence of politics and inspires reflection on the fundamental questions of statesmanship and political leadership. This book explores themes such as classical republicanism and liberty, the rule of law and morality, the nature and limits of statesmanship, and the character of democracy.

Author : Edward Berry
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521263034
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Shakespeare's Comic Rites written by Edward Berry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-10-18 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Berry combines social history, anthropology and literary criticism to Shakespeare's romantic comedies.

Author : Ruth Nevo
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136557059
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Comic Transformations in Shakespeare written by Ruth Nevo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1980. In this study of Shakespeare's ten early comedies, from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night, the concept of a dynamic of comic form is developed; the Falstaff plays are seen as a watershed, and the emergence of new comic protagonists - the resourceful, anti-romantic romantic heroine and the Fool - as the summit of the achievement. The plays are explored from three complementary perspectives - theoretical, developmental and interpretative which lead to a further understanding of the powerful relation between the plays' formal complexity and their naturalistic verisimilitude.

Author : Paul A. Olson
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803215740
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Beyond a Common Joy written by Paul A. Olson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ?Soul of the age!? Ben Jonson eulogized Shakespeare, and in the next breath, ?He was not of an age but for all time.? That he was both ?of the age? and ?for all time? is, this book suggests, the key to Shakespeare?s comic genius. In this engaging introduction to the First Folio comedies, Paul A. Olson gives a persuasive and thoroughly engrossing account of the playwright?s comic transcendence, showing how Shakespeare, by taking on the great themes of his time, elevated comedy from a mere mid-level literary form to its own form of greatness?on par with epic and tragedy. Like the best tragic or epic writers, Shakespeare in his comedies goes beyond private and domestic matters in order to draw on the whole of the commonwealth. He examines how a ruler?s or a court?s community at the household and local levels shapes the politics of empire?existing or nascent empires such as England, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire or part empires such as Rome and Athens?where all their suffering and silliness play into how they govern. In Olson?s work we also see how Shakespeare?s appropriation of his age?s ideas about classical myth and biblical scriptures bring to his comic action a sort of sacral profundity in keeping with notions of poetry as ?inspired? and comic endings as more than merely happy but as, in fact, uncommonly joyful.

Author : Frances N. Teague
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 9780838635247
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Acting Funny written by Frances N. Teague and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, these assumptions lead to the corollary that such hierarchies are natural and immutable and not fashioned by critics.

Author : Joseph Allen Bryant
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 9780813130958
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy written by Joseph Allen Bryant and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 1986 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse. Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early a.

Author : Karen Newman
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136557407
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character written by Karen Newman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1985. In this revisionist history of comic characterization, Karen Newman argues that, contrary to received opinion, Shakespeare was not the first comic dramatist to create self-conscious characters who seem 'lifelike' or 'realistic'. His comic practice is firmly set within a comic tradition which stretches from Plautus and Menander to playwrights of the Italian Renaissance.

Author : John L. Palmer
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1349152153
Total Pages : 495 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Political and Comic Characters of Shakespeare written by John L. Palmer and published by Springer. This book was released on 1962-12-01 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Kenneth Muir
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Shakespeare's Comic Sequence written by Kenneth Muir and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: