Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Shakespeare

Although many commentators have been intrigued by the possible effects of the death of Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, on the writer, "Shakespeare and Son: A Journey in Writing and Grieving" is the first full-length study examining the evidence that Shakespeare's later work was deeply involved with this loss. The book is also the first full-length study to explore Shakespeare's works in light of the psychology of grief, combining psychological insights with literary analysis.

Specifically, the book explores 20 plays from all parts of Shakespeare's career, concentrating on works known to...

Armed with a fresh analysis of Shakespeare's inherited resources for articulating anxieties rooted in philosophical doubt, Skulsky shows that in four plays--"Hamlet," "Measure for Measure," "King Lear," and "Othello"--the drama of doubt in search of an exit gives its own kind of urgency to the more familiar Shakespearean drama of action and motive.

From Skulsky's study, the four plays emerge as insidiously telling exercises in challenging our working faith in the objectivity of moral choice and the possibility of knowing other minds. In particular, Skulsky notes that Shakespeare takes...

This collection of essays documents the indebtedness and thematic similarities uniting Shakespeare and eight southern authors--William Gilmore Simms, Henry Timrod, Sidney Lanier, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Walker Percy.

Each of these essays, written expressly for this collection, examines the shared cultural heritage in which Shakespeare has been received as well as the significant ways in which each of these writers has responded to Shakespeare.

Since no other single work currently exists that exclusively considers this subject,...

Richard Hillman pursues his exploration of English tragedy in relation to France with a frank concentration on Shakespeare. Instead of focusing on common paradigms, he sets out to theorise more abstract tragic qualities (such as nostalgia, futility and heroism), but again with reference to specific French texts and contexts. Three manifestations of the 'Shakespearean tragic' are singled out: Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra and All's Well That Ends Well, a comedy with melancholic overtones whose French setting is shown to be richly significant. Hillman brings to bear on each of these central...

In these essays Northrop Frye addresses a question which preoccupied him throughout his long and distinguished career - the conception of comedy, particularly Shakespearean comedy, and its relation to human experience.

In most forms of comedy, and certainly in the New Comedy with which Shakespeare was concerned, the emphasis is on moving towards a climax in which the end incorporates the beginning. Such a climax is a vision of deliverance or expanded energy and freedom. Frye draws on the Aristotelian notion of reversal, or peripeteia, to analyse the three plays commonly...