Shakespeare and the Nature of Love
Title | Shakespeare and the Nature of Love PDF eBook |
Author | Marcus Nordlund |
Publisher | Northwestern University Press |
Pages | 245 |
Release | 2007-08-27 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 0810124238 |
The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare’s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about love, biology, and culture raised by his method, Nordlund considers four specific forms of love in seven of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the vicissitudes of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, he argues that Shakespeare makes a sustained inquiry into the impact of culture and society upon the natural human affections. King Lear offers insight into the conflicted relationship between love and duty. In two problem plays about romantic love, Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well, the tension between individual idiosyncrasies and social consensus becomes especially salient. And finally, in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, Nordlund asks what Shakespeare can tell us about the dark avatar of jealousy.
Shakespeare and the Nature of Man
Title | Shakespeare and the Nature of Man PDF eBook |
Author | Theodore Spencer |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 256 |
Release | 2009-07-20 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9781108003773 |
Analysing Shakespeare's historical background and craft, Spencer's 1943 study investigates the intellectual debates of Shakespeare's age, and the effect these had on the drama of the time. The book outlines the key conflict present in the sixteenth century - the optimistic ideal of man's place in the universe, as presented by the theorists of the time, set against the indisputable and ever-present fact of original sin. This conflict about the nature of man, argues Spencer, is perhaps the deepest underlying cause for the emergence of great Renaissance drama. With detailed reference to Shakespeare's great tragedies, the book demonstrates how Shakespeare presents the fact of evil masked by the appearance of good. Shakespeare's last plays, especially The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, are also analysed in detail to show how they embody a different view from the tragedies, and the discussion is related to the larger perspective of general human experience.
Shakespeare Among the Animals
Title | Shakespeare Among the Animals PDF eBook |
Author | B. Boehrer |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 225 |
Release | 2002-03-21 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0230602126 |
Shakespeare Among the Animals examines the role of animal-metaphor in the Shakespeare stage, particularly as such metaphor serves to underwrite various forms of social difference. Working through texts such as Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream , Jonson's Volpone , and Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside , different chapters of the study focus upon the allegedly natural character of femininity, masculinity, and ethnicity, while a fourth chapter considers the nature of the natural world itself as it appears on the Renaissance stage. Addressing each of these topics in turn, Shakespeare Among the Animals explores the notions of cultural order that underlie early modern conceptions of the natural world, and the ideas of nature implicit in early modern social practice.
Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary
Title | Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary PDF eBook |
Author | Sophie Chiari |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 456 |
Release | 2022-01-27 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1350110485 |
While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.
Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature
Title | Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature PDF eBook |
Author | John F. Danby |
Publisher | |
Pages | 234 |
Release | 1965 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment
Title | Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment PDF eBook |
Author | Sophie Chiari |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press |
Pages | 364 |
Release | 2018-10-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1474442552 |
The first comprehensive history of Byzantine warfare in the tenth century
Shakespeare and the Nature of Time
Title | Shakespeare and the Nature of Time PDF eBook |
Author | Frederick Turner |
Publisher | Oxford : Clarendon Press |
Pages | 212 |
Release | 1971 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN |