Shakespeare's Tudor History: A Study of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2

ISBN-13: 9781138704336 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 238 str.

Tom McAlindon

Opis

This title was first published in 2002: An intensive study of Shakespeare's most ambitious and complex achievement in the historical mode. The book offers an account of the play's critical history from 1700 until the 1980s, deals with the aspects of Tudor history relevant to an understanding, and offers close readings of the text structured around what the author believes to be the play's three dominant concepts: time; truth; and grace. In an attempt to correct what he sees as a certain falsification of critical history, the author aligns his account of the play's reception with one of its major preoccupations - the inescapable and informing presence of the past.

Spis treści

Part 1 Contexts: a critical history - a masterpiece, comic history, structures, 19th-century interpretations, 20th-century interpretations - conservative Shakespeare, 20th-century interpretations - ambivalent Shakespeare; a Tudor history - present and past; rebellion, the colours of rebellion and the problem of truth, rumour's tongues, what is a man but his promise, treachery and distrust, grace and favour. Part 2 Text: time - Tudor time, Henry IV - imagery and design, the King, Esperance ma comforte - the rebels, continual laughter - Falstaff, sunlike majesty - the heir apparent; truth - oaths, perjury and language, royal duplicity - Henry and Prince John, the rebels - divided and dividing, the word of the noble - Sir John Falstaff, knight, true prince or princely hypocrite?; grace - grace and honour, a god on earth - Henry and Prince John, the king of honour - Sir Harry Percy, Sir John - the reforming knight, the ungracious boy, epilogue. Appendices: Twelfth Night and temperate mirth; swearing and forswearing in the histories from Henry VI to Richard.