Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Shakespeare

Challenging the traditional view that Shakespeare's early comedies are about the experience of romantic love and constitute a genre called romantic comedy, Camille Wells Slights demonstrates that they dramatize individual action in the context of social dynamics, reflecting and commenting on the culture in which they originated. Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths sheds new light on ten Shakespearean comedies: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of...

Original in topic and approach, Searching Shakespeare presents a political-historical exploration of Shakespeare's drama, examining the plays in the context of current ideological concerns - history, memory, marginality, and nationalism. Derek Cohen predicates his argument on the supposition that the individual, as much as the encompassing state, is subject to the shaping forces and machinery of the ideological surround.

Shakespeare's plays, Cohen argues, consistently portray the clash between the passionate search for individuality and the quest for social harmony as...

What was it like to be in the audience of the Globe Theater in 1606? By demonstrating fundamental connections between audience reaction then and the use of computers today, Renaissance scholar Arthur Kinney explores the cultural moment of one of Shakespeare's most popular tragedies.

Examining the cultural practices and beliefs that influenced Shakespeare's writing of Macbeth, Kinney reconstructs how playgoers in 1606 understood that drama when it was first presented and shows how many congruent and often conflicting perspectives played on their minds. Calling on hundreds of documents...

This collection of original essays provides a selection of current criticism on the Henry VI plays. Topics addressed will include feminist commentaries on the play, the principal of unity in the trilogy, the tradition of illumination of the play, textual variations, and finally, anachronism and allegory.