Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Shakespeare

Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly promiscuous in its application and effects. Subsequently, much writing in the period reflects a desire to ward off music's illegibility rather than come to terms with its actual effects. In Broken Harmony, Joseph M. Ortiz revises our understanding of music's relationship to language in Renaissance England. In the process he shows the degree to which discussions of music were ideologically...

Drawing on an extensive--frequently unconventional--range of examples, Thompson examines the contact zones between constructions of Shakespeare and constructions of race. Among the questions she addresses are: Do Shakespeare's plays need to be edited,...

Robert G. Hunter maintains that the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Elizabethan mind was in great part responsible for the emergence of the outstanding tragedies of the age. Luther and Calvin caused men to ask how God can be just if man is not free, and Shakespeare's greatest tragedies confront the vexing problems posed by these altered conceptions of man's freedom of will and God's providential control of natural circumstance.

Shakespeare's audiences were not single-minded. He wrote for semi-Pelagians, Augustinians, Calvinists, and men and women who did not know what to...

The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" -- the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of association, cultural producers and consumers challenged dominant ideas about just who...

Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare's timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare's uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life. In Shakespeare Only, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare's authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually understood...

Pastoral was one of the most popular literary forms of early modern England. Inspired by classical and Italian Renaissance antecedents, writers from Ben Jonson to John Beaumont and Abraham Cowley wrote in idealized terms about the English countryside. It is often argued that the Renaissance pastoral was a highly figurative mode of writing that had more to do with culture and politics than with the actual countryside of England. For decades now literary criticism has had it that in pastoral verse, hills and crags and moors were extolled for their metaphoric worth, rather than for their own...

This complete, line-by-line translation of Julius Caesar makes the language of Shakespeare's play contemporary while preserving the metrical rhythm, complexity, and poetic qualities of the original.

The aim is to capture both sound and sense of Shakespeare's tragedy without the need for glosses or notes to use contemporary language without simplifying or modernizing the play in any other way.

Readers experience Shakespeare's tale of the brutal assassination of Rome's most famous leader with the comprehension and delight of audiences 400 years ago, the way Shakespeare intended....