Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Shakespeare

Despite their diversity in tone and subject matter, Shakespeare's four mature tragedies--Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth--all have an essential experience in common. Bernard McElroy defines this experience as the collapse of the subjective world of the tragic hero.

Originally published in 1973.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these...

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of thosefigures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally andinternationally.

In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution ofJames Joyce, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Samuel Beckett to the afterlife andreception of Shakespeare and his works.Each essay assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figurecovered and of that figure on the understanding, interpretation andappreciation of Shakespeare, providing a sketch of its...

In this bold reconceptualization of Shakespeare's histories as plays that ultimately generate and seek to legitimize new kings, Barbara Hodgdon examines how closure contests as well as celebrates power relations dominant in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean society--particularly those between sovereign and subjects. Taking a broad view of closure as a developing process in which narrative structures, generic signs, and rhetorical conventions play contributory, and often contradictory, roles, she also considers how theatrical representations interpret, or reinterpret, closural features to...

Divine retribution, Robert Reed argues, is a principal driving force in Shakespeare's English history plays and three of his major tragedies. Reed finds evidence of the playwright's growing ingenuity and maturing skill in his treatment of the crime of political homicide, its impact on events, and God's judgment on the criminal.

Reed's analysis focuses upon Tudor concepts that he shows were familiar to all Elizabethans -- the biblical principle of inherited guilt, the doctrine that God is the fountainhead of retribution, with man merely His instrument, and the view that conscience...

This is the first study to relate the Greek romances to Elizabethan drama. It focuses upon the Greek romance materials in Shakespeare's plays to clarify the background of his art and to illuminate the relationship between the two literatures. The Greek romance tradition is described historically and traced through the works of Boccaccio and Cervantes, as well as other continental and English writers. Then, full attention is given to those plays of Shakespeare which utilize the Greek materials.

The notes are full and, with the aid of the extensive index, can serve as a manual of the...

Many critics hold that Shakespeare's King Lear is primarily a drama of meaningful suffering and redemption within a just universe ruled by providential higher powers. William Elton's King Lear and the Gods challenges the validity of this widespread optimistic view. Testing the prevailing view against the play's acknowledged sources, and analyzing the functions of the double plot, the characters, and the play's implicit ironies, Elton concludes that this standard interpretation constitutes a serious misreading of the tragedy.

This volume in the Shakespeare Criticism series offers a range of approaches to Twelfth Night, including its critical reception, performance history, and relation to early modern culture.

James Schiffer's extensive introduction surveys the play's critical reception and performance history, while individual essays explore a variety of topics relevant to a full appreciation of the play: early modern notions of love, friendship, sexuality, madness, festive ritual, exoticism, social mobility, and detection. The contributors approach these topics from a variety...