Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

ISBN-13: 9780748640461 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 224 str.

Catherine Belsey

Opis

In these essays, collected here for the first time, renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, she demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades, while a new introduction offers a narrative and analytical overview, from a participant's perspective, of some of its key implications.Written with verve and conviction, this book shows how texts can offer access to the dissonances of the past when theory finds an outcome in practice.

Spis treści

Preface; 1. Introduction: Practising with Theory; 2. Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne; 3. Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis; 4. Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece; 5. Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets; 6. Peter Quince's Ballad: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night's Dream; 7. The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy; 8. Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V; 9. The Case of Hamlet's Conscience; 10. Iago the Essayist; Notes; Index.