How the Classics Made Shakespeare
Title | How the Classics Made Shakespeare PDF eBook |
Author | Jonathan Bate |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Total Pages | 378 |
Release | 2020-10-13 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0691210144 |
"This book grew from the inaugural E. H. Gombrich Lectures in the Classical Tradition that I delivered in the autumn of 2013 at the Warburg Institute of the University of London, under the title, "Ancient Strength: Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition"--Preface, page ix.
Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity
Title | Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity PDF eBook |
Author | Colin Burrow |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 290 |
Release | 2013-09-05 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0199684782 |
Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity explains the nature and extent of Shakspeare's classical learning, exploring why Ben Jonson was wrong to claim that he had 'small Latin and less Greek'. It examines Shakespeare's relationship to classical texts and how this relationship changed in the course of his career.
Shakespeare and the Classics
Title | Shakespeare and the Classics PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Martindale |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 340 |
Release | 2011-02-24 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9781139453639 |
Shakespeare and the Classics demonstrates that the classics are of central importance in Shakespeare's plays and in the structure of his imagination. Written by an international team of Shakespeareans and classicists, this book investigates Shakespeare's classicism and shows how he used a variety of classical books to explore crucial areas of human experience such as love, politics, ethics and history. The book focuses on Shakespeare's favourite classical authors, especially Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plautus and Terence, and, in translation only, Plutarch. Attention is also paid to the humanist background and to Shakespeare's knowledge of Greek literature and culture. The final section, from the perspective of reception, examines how Shakespeare's classicism was seen and used by later writers. This accessible book offers a rounded and comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare's classicism and will be a useful first port of call for students and others approaching the subject.
Soul of the Age
Title | Soul of the Age PDF eBook |
Author | Jonathan Bate |
Publisher | Random House |
Total Pages | 495 |
Release | 2009-04-07 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 1588367819 |
“One man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.” In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before. Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I’s passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew. Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare’s experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be.
Shakespeare
Title | Shakespeare PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Van Doren |
Publisher | New York Review of Books |
Total Pages | 340 |
Release | 2005-08-31 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9781590171684 |
This legendary book by an esteemed poet and beloved professor at Columbia University features a series of smart, witty, deeply perceptive essays about each of Shakespeare's plays, together with a further discussion of the poems. Writing with an incomparable knowledge of his subject but without a hint of pedantry, Van Doren elucidates both the astonishing boldness and myriad subtleties of Shakespeare's protean art. His Shakespeare is a book to be treasured by both new and longtime students of the Bard.
The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature
Title | The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Sean Keilen |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Total Pages | 334 |
Release | 2017-03-31 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317041682 |
In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.
Shakespeare and Ovid
Title | Shakespeare and Ovid PDF eBook |
Author | Jonathan Bate |
Publisher | Oxford University Press on Demand |
Total Pages | 292 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0198183240 |
This is the first comprehensive account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his favourite poet, Ovid, examining the full range of Shakespeare's works.