Shakespeare's Clown

Shakespeare's Clown
Title Shakespeare's Clown PDF eBook
Author David Wiles
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Pages 244
Release 2005-06-30
Genre Drama
ISBN 9780521673341

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Focusing on the clown Will Kemp, this book shows how Shakespeare and other dramatists wrote specific roles as vehicles for him.

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare

The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare
Title The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare PDF eBook
Author Robert Hornback
Publisher D. S. Brewer
Pages 268
Release 2009
Genre Drama
ISBN

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A new account of medieval and Renaissance clown traditions reveals the true extent of their cultural influence.

The Stage Clown in Shakespeare's Theatre

The Stage Clown in Shakespeare's Theatre
Title The Stage Clown in Shakespeare's Theatre PDF eBook
Author Bente Videbaek
Publisher Praeger
Pages 232
Release 1996
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN

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The majority of Shakespeare's plays have at least one clown figure making an appearance. These characters range from rogues who say only a line or two, to important figures like Touchstone and Falstaff. Videbaek examines even the smallest clown roles, showing how the clown's freedom of speech allows him to become a mediator between the audience and the action of the play, helping audience interpretation. This illuminating celebration of the stage clown's contribution to the understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays will be a valuable resource for both students and scholars alike.

A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies

A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies
Title A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies PDF eBook
Author Michael Mangan
Publisher Routledge
Pages 282
Release 2014-06-06
Genre Drama
ISBN 1317895037

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This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England

Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England
Title Libels and Theater in Shakespeare's England PDF eBook
Author Joseph Mansky
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Pages 267
Release 2023-09-30
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1009362763

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The first comprehensive history of the Elizabethan libel, this interdisciplinary account traces a viral and often virulent media ecosystem.

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment
Title Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment PDF eBook
Author Kent Cartwright
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 208
Release 2021-11-11
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 019263965X

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Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment argues that enchantment constitutes a key emotional and intellectual dimension of Shakespeare's comedies. It thus makes a new claim about the rejuvenating value of comedy for individuals and society. Shakespeare's comedies orchestrate ongoing encounters between the rational and the mysterious, between doubt and fascination, with feelings moved by elements of enchantment that also seem a little ridiculous. In such a drama, lines of causality become complex, and even satisfying endings leave certain matters incomplete and contingent—openings for scrutiny and thought. In addressing enchantment, the book takes exception to the modernist vision of a deterministic 'disenchanted' world. As Shakespeare's action advances, comic mysteries accrue—uncanny coincidences; magical sympathies; inexplicable repetitions; psychic influences; and puzzlements about the meaning of events—all of whose numinous effects linger ambiguously after reason has apparently answered the play's questions. Separate chapters explore the devices, tropes, and motifs of enchantment: magical clowns who alter the action through stop-time interludes; structural repetitions that suggest mysteriously converging, even opaquely providential destinies; locales that oppose magical and protean forces to regulatory and quotidian values; desires, thoughts, and utterances that 'manifest' comically monstrous events; characters who return from the dead, facilitated by the desires of the living; play-endings crossed by harmony and dissonance, with moments of wonder that make possible the mysterious action of forgiveness. Wonder and wondering in Shakespeare's and other comedies, it emerges, become the conditions for new possibilities. Chapters refer extensively to early modern history, Renaissance and modern theories of comedy, treatises on magical science, and contemporaneous Italian and Tudor comedy.

Shakespeare's Brain

Shakespeare's Brain
Title Shakespeare's Brain PDF eBook
Author Mary Thomas Crane
Publisher Princeton University Press
Pages 276
Release 2010-02-20
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1400824001

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Here Mary Thomas Crane considers the brain as a site where body and culture meet to form the subject and its expression in language. Taking Shakespeare as her case study, she boldly demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive theory--a theory which argues that language is produced by a reciprocal interaction of body and environment, brain and culture, and which refocuses attention on the role of the author in the making of meaning. Crane reveals in Shakespeare's texts a web of structures and categories through which meaning is created. The approach yields fresh insights into a wide range of his plays, including The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. ? Crane's cognitive reading traces the complex interactions of cultural and cognitive determinants of meaning as they play themselves out in Shakespeare's texts. She shows how each play centers on a word or words conveying multiple meanings (such as "act," "pinch," "pregnant," "villain and clown"), and how each cluster has been shaped by early modern ideological formations. The book also chronicles the playwright's developing response to the material conditions of subject formation in early modern England. Crane reveals that Shakespeare in his comedies first explored the social spaces within which the subject is formed, such as the home, class hierarchy, and romantic courtship. His later plays reveal a greater preoccupation with how the self is formed within the body, as the embodied mind seeks to make sense of and negotiate its physical and social environment.