Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in "The Merchant of Venice" who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare s most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence andhis varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare s plays? Kenneth Gross posits thatthe figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself....
Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in "The Merchant of Venice" who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors...
"You common cry of curs whose breath I hate / As reek o'th'rotten fens, whose loves I prize / As the dead carcasses of unburied men / That do corrupt my air: I banish you " (from Coriolanus) Kenneth Gross explores Shakespeare's deep fascination with dangerous and disorderly forms of speaking-especially rumor, slander, insult, vituperation, and curse-and through them offers a vision of the work of words in his plays. Coriolanus's taunts or Lear's curses force us to think not just about how Shakespeare's characters speak, but also about how they hear, overhear, and mishear what is...
"You common cry of curs whose breath I hate / As reek o'th'rotten fens, whose loves I prize / As the dead carcasses of unburied men / That do corrupt...
We live among the images we have made, and those images have an uncanny life. They seduce, challenge, trap, transform, and even kill us; they speak and remain silent. Kenneth Gross's The Dream of the Moving Statue offers a far-ranging and probing exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined the power and life of statues, real and metaphoric, taking up examples from antiquity to modernity, from Ovid, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare to Freud, Rilke, and Charlie Chaplin. The book is about the fate of works of art and about the fate of our fantasies, words, and...
We live among the images we have made, and those images have an uncanny life. They seduce, challenge, trap, transform, and even kill us; they speak...
The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects--objects that are also actors and images of life.
The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the...
The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts a...
