Shakespeare
Title | Shakespeare PDF eBook |
Author | Kiernan Ryan |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 313 |
Release | 2014-06-11 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 1317889614 |
This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.
Shakespeare's Last Plays
Title | Shakespeare's Last Plays PDF eBook |
Author | Stephen W. Smith |
Publisher | Lexington Books |
Total Pages | 264 |
Release | 2002 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780739103616 |
What were Shakespeare's final thoughts on history, tragedy, and comedy? Shakespeare's Last Plays focuses much needed scholarly attention on Shakespeare's "Late Romances." The work--a collection of newly commissioned essays by leading scholars of classical political philosophy and literature--offers careful textual analysis of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The essays reveal how Shakespeare's thought in these final works compliments, challenges, fulfills, or transforms previously held conceptions of the playwright and his political-philosophical views.
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Last Plays
Title | The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Last Plays PDF eBook |
Author | Catherine M. S. Alexander |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 245 |
Release | 2009-07-16 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1139828282 |
Which plays are included under the heading 'Shakespeare's last plays', and when does Shakespeare's 'last' period begin? What is meant by a 'late play', and what are the benefits in defining plays in this way? Reflecting the recent growth of interest in late studies, and recognising the gaps in accessible scholarship on this area, in this book leading international Shakespeare scholars address these and many other questions. The essays locate Shakespeare's last plays - single and co-authored - in the period of their composition, consider the significant characteristics of their Jacobean context, and explore the rich afterlives, on stage, in print and other media of The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. The volume opens with a historical timeline that places the plays in the contexts of contemporary political events, theatrical events, other cultural milestones, Shakespeare's life and that of his playing company, the King's Men.
Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle
Title | Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle PDF eBook |
Author | Doris Alexander |
Publisher | Penn State Press |
Total Pages | 354 |
Release | 2010-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0271041021 |
In Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle, Doris Alexander gives us a new kind of inside biography that begins where the others leave off. It follows O'Neill through the door into his writing room to give a blow-by-blow account of how he fought out in his plays his great life battles&—love against hate, doubt against belief, life against death&—to an ever-expanding understanding. It presents a new kind of criticism, showing how O'Neill's most intimate struggles worked their way to resolution through the drama of his plays. Alexander reveals that he was engineering his own consciousness through his plays and solving his life problems&—while the tone, imagery, and richness of the plays all came out of the nexus of memories summoned up by the urgency of the problems he faced in them. By the way of O'Neill, this study moves toward a theory of the impulse that sets off a writer's creativity, and a theory of how that impulse acts to shape a work, not only in a dramatist like O'Neill but also in the case of writers in other mediums, and even of painters and composers. The study begins with Desire Under the Elms because that play's plot was consolidated by a dream that opened up the transfixing grief that precipitated the play for O'Neill, and it ends with Days Without End when he had resolved his major emotional-philosophical struggle and created within himself the voice of his final great plays. Since the analysis brings to bear on the plays all of his conscious decisions, ideas, theories, as well as the life-and-death struggles motivating them, documenting even the final creative changes made during rehearsals, this book provides a definitive account of the nine plays analyzed in detail (Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, and Days Without End, with additional analysis of plays written before and after.
Shakespeare's Last Plays
Title | Shakespeare's Last Plays PDF eBook |
Author | Eustace M. Tillyard |
Publisher | A&C Black |
Total Pages | 94 |
Release | 2014-01-13 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1472510828 |
Shakespeare's Last Plays was the first of E. M. W. Tilyard's influential works on Shakespeare. In it, Dr Tilyard argues that the last plays – Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest – develop patterns found in the earlier works. He shows how Shakespeare intertwines reconciliation (the final phase of the tragedies) with an awareness of possible worlds (where the 'natural' and supernatural have equal status), and concludes that The Tempest, by subordinating his tragic pattern, is his greatest achievement.
Last Things and Last Plays
Title | Last Things and Last Plays PDF eBook |
Author | Cynthia Marshall |
Publisher | SIU Press |
Total Pages | 168 |
Release | 1991 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 9780809316892 |
In this first sustained examination of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and The Tempest in the context of English Renaissance discussions of death, judgment, and afterlife, Cynthia Marshall contends that the late plays of Shakespeare represent the active concerns of a culture heavily imbued with apocalypticism. Only recently has there been wide recognition of how thoroughly apocalyptic thought pervaded the culture of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Millenarians, Puritans, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics all shared a concern for last things. Even King James I, speaking in Star Chamber, referred to "the latter days drawing on." In fact, these four plays, considered in themselves, exhibit distinctive qualities of "lastness." They contain, Marshall argues, an alternative theatrical eschatology, representing anxieties about judgment, hopes for personal reunion, and transcendent perspectives on time.
Shakespeares Last Plays
Title | Shakespeares Last Plays PDF eBook |
Author | F.A. Yates |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 119 |
Release | 2013-10-08 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1136354247 |
This is Volume VI in the selected works of Frances Yates, providing a new approach to Shakespeare's last plays. First published in 1975, these are a collection of lectures that offer the new thinking about certain ideas concerning Shakespeare's relation to the problemsand thought currents of his times.