Shakespeare and the Power of the Face

Shakespeare and the Power of the Face PDF Author: James A. Knapp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131705637X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book

Book Description
Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare’s England helps explain moments when Shakespeare’s language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare’s treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing interpretation and production of the plays. Engaging with a variety of critical strands that have emerged from the so-called turn to the body, the contributors to this volume argue that Shakespeare’s invitation to look to the face for clues to inner character is not an invitation to seek a static text beneath an external image, but rather to experience the power of the face to initiate reflection, judgment, and action. The evidence of the plays suggests that Shakespeare understood that this experience was extremely complex and mysterious. By turning attention to the face, the collection offers important new analyses of a key feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic attention to the part of the body that garnered the most commentary in early modern England. By bringing together critics interested in material culture studies with those focused on philosophies of self and other and historians and theorists of performance, Shakespeare and the Power of the Face constitutes a significant contribution to our growing understanding of attitudes towards embodiment in Shakespeare’s England.

Shakespeare and the Power of the Face

Shakespeare and the Power of the Face PDF Author: James A. Knapp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131705637X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book

Book Description
Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare’s England helps explain moments when Shakespeare’s language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare’s treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing interpretation and production of the plays. Engaging with a variety of critical strands that have emerged from the so-called turn to the body, the contributors to this volume argue that Shakespeare’s invitation to look to the face for clues to inner character is not an invitation to seek a static text beneath an external image, but rather to experience the power of the face to initiate reflection, judgment, and action. The evidence of the plays suggests that Shakespeare understood that this experience was extremely complex and mysterious. By turning attention to the face, the collection offers important new analyses of a key feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic attention to the part of the body that garnered the most commentary in early modern England. By bringing together critics interested in material culture studies with those focused on philosophies of self and other and historians and theorists of performance, Shakespeare and the Power of the Face constitutes a significant contribution to our growing understanding of attitudes towards embodiment in Shakespeare’s England.

Shakespeare and the Power of the Face

Shakespeare and the Power of the Face PDF Author: James A. Knapp
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781315608655
Category : Face perception in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description


Shakespeare's Face

Shakespeare's Face PDF Author: Stephanie Nolen
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307366510
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book

Book Description
On May 11, 2001, Globe and Mail reporter Stephanie Nolen announced a stunning discovery to the world: an attractive portrait held by an Ontario family for twelve generations, which may well be the only known portrait of Shakespeare painted during his lifetime. Shakespeare’s Face is the biography of a portrait — a literary mystery story — and the furious debate that has ensued since its discovery. A slip of paper affixed to the back proclaims “Shakespere. This likeness taken 1603, Age at that time 39 ys.” But is it really Shakespeare who peers at us from the small oil on wood painting? The twinkling eyes, reddish hair, and green jacket are not in keeping with the duller, traditional images of the bard. But they are more suggestive of the humorous and humane man who wrote the greatest plays in the English language. Shakespeare’s Face tells the riveting story of how the painting came to reside in the home of a retired engineer in a mid-sized Ontario town. The painting is reputed to be by John Sanders of Worcester, England. As a retirement project, the engineer, whose grandmother kept the family treasure under her bed, embarked on authenticating the portrait: the forensic analyses that followed have proven it without doubt to the period. In a remarkable publishing coup, Knopf Canada has gathered around Stephanie Nolen’s story a group of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars and art and cultural historians to delve into one of the most fascinating literary mysteries of our times: “Is this the face of genius?” Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Shakespeare’s Face by Stephanie Nolen By the late afternoon I was beginning to go a little cross-eyed. I had examined countless documents and read the test results from the painting’s painstaking forensic analysis. I now had everything I needed to write my story — except for one crucial item. “Is he here?” I asked, almost in a whisper.... The owner laid the package carefully on the cluttered table. He gently pulled back the kraft paper wrapping, underneath which was a layer of bubble wrap. Then he peeled back this second layer to reveal his treasure. I was caught off-guard by how small the portrait was — and how vivid. The colours in the paint seemed too rich to be 400 years old. Except for the hairline cracks in the varnish, the face could have been painted yesterday. And there was nothing austere or haughty about it, nothing of the great man being painted for posterity. It was a rogue’s face, a charmer’s face that looked back at me with a tolerant, mischievous slightly world-weary air.... It was painted on two pieces of solid board so expertly joined that the seam was barely visible. A date, “Ano 1603”, was painted in small red letters in the top right hand corner. The right side had been nibbled by woodworms.... I stood and gazed, quelling an instinctive urge to pick the portrait up and hold it in my hands. And as my professional skepticism crumpled for a moment, I found myself wanting desperately to believe that this was indeed Shakespeare’s face.

Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity

Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity PDF Author: Karl F. Zender
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807133558
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book

Book Description
The life expectancy in Shakespearean times averaged only about twenty-five to thirty-five years, but those who survived the illnesses of infancy and childhood could look forward to a long life with nearly the same level of confidence as someone living now. But even so long ago, some faced conflicts in their middle and later years that remain familiar today. In Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity, Karl F. Zender explores William Shakespeare's depictions of middle age by examining the relationships between middle-aged parents -- mainly fathers -- and their children in five of his greatest plays. He finds that the middle-aged characters in King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest -- much like their modern counterparts -- experience a fear of aging and debility. Representations of middle age occur throughout the Shakespearean canon, in forms ranging from Jaques' "seven ages" speech in As You Like It to the emphasis -- almost an obsession -- in many plays on relations between the generations. Lear, Zender shows, tries to forestall the approach of old age with a fantasy of literal rebirth in his relationship with Cordelia. Macbeth depicts an even more urgent struggle against midlife decline, while in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare portrays two characters in midlife crisis who attempt to redefine their identities by memorializing their former status and power, now lost. Drawing on Erik Erikson's theory of generativity -- a midlife shift from advancing one's own career to aiding a younger generation -- Zender explores the difficulties Shakespeare's characters face as they transfer power and authority to their children and others in the next generation. Paying careful attention to the plays' moral and ethical implications, he demonstrates how Shakespeare's innovative depiction of the midlife experience focuses on internal psychological understanding rather than external actions such as ceremony and ritual. Illuminating and engaging, Shakespeare, Midlife, and Generativity offers a fresh analysis of several of Shakespeare's most important plays and explores a profound, centuries-old perspective on the challenges inherent in middle age.

Shakespeare and Trump

Shakespeare and Trump PDF Author: Jeffrey R. Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 1439919429
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
Revealing the modernity of Shakespeare's politics, and the theatricality of Trump's

THE LORDS AND OWNERS OF THEIR FACES: SHAKESPEARE'S WOMEN AND POWER.

THE LORDS AND OWNERS OF THEIR FACES: SHAKESPEARE'S WOMEN AND POWER. PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
men who love them of certain distorted notions about women, and teach them to know themselves. In this respect, the "Dark Lady" of the Sonnets is an archetype.

Shakespeare, Our Contemporary

Shakespeare, Our Contemporary PDF Author: Jan Kott
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0804152195
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare, Our Contemporary is a provocative, original study of the major plays of Shakespeare. More than that, it is one of the few critical works to have strongly influenced theatrical productions. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz are among the many directors who have acknowledged their debt to Jan Kott, finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage conceptions. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961, and readers all over the world have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched.

Shakespeare and Faulkner

Shakespeare and Faulkner PDF Author: Karl F. Zender
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175455
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare and Faulkner explores the moral and ethical dilemmas that characters face inside themselves and in their interactions with others in the works of these two famed authors. Karl F. Zender’s characterological study offers insightful, critically rigorous, and at times quite personal analyses of the complicated figures who inhabit several major Shakespeare plays and Faulkner novels. The two parts of this book—the first of which focuses on the English playwright, the second on the Mississippi novelist—share a common methodology in that they originate in Zender’s history as a teacher of and writer on the two authors, who until now he generally approached separately. He emphasizes the evolving insights gleaned from reading these authors over several decades, situating their texts in relation to shifting trends in criticism and highlighting the contemporary relevance of their works. The final chapter, an extended discussion of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, attempts something unusual in Zender’s critical practice: It relies less on the close textual analysis that characterizes his previous work and instead explores the intersections between events depicted in the novel and his own life, both as a child and as an adult. Shakespeare and Faulkner speaks to the power of literature as a form of pleasure and of solace. With this work of engaged and thoughtful scholarly criticism, Zender reveals the centrality of storytelling to human beings’ efforts to make sense both of their journey through life and of the circumstances in which they live.

Shakespeare's Freedom

Shakespeare's Freedom PDF Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226306674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163

Get Book

Book Description
With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Greenblatt, author of the bestselling "Will in the World," shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes as scripture, monarch, and God, and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them.

The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics: Power and Kingship in Shakespeare’s History Plays

The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics: Power and Kingship in Shakespeare’s History Plays PDF Author: Urszula Kizelbach
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401211663
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book

Book Description
Early modern kings adopted a new style of government, Realpolitik, as spelled out in Machiavelli’s writings. Tudor monarchs, well aware of their questionable right to the throne, posed as great dissimulators, similarly to the modern prince who “must learn from the fox and the lion”. This book paints a portrait of a successful politician according to early modern standards. Kingship is no longer understood as a divinely ordained institution, but is defined as goal-oriented policy-making, relying on conscious acting and the theatrical display of power. The volume offers an intriguing discussion on kingship in pragmatic terms, as the strategic face-saving behaviour of Shakespeare’s kings. It also demonstrates how an efficient or inefficient management of the king’s political face could decide his success or failure as a monarch, and how the Renaissance world of Shakespeare’s history plays is combined with modern theories of communication, politeness and face. “Many studies in historical pragmatics or historical stylistics purport to expose language use in social context, but they fall short when measured against this study. The author approaches Shakespeare with concepts from literary studies and linguistic pragmatics, and weaves them together seamlessly with social history. The result is a treasure trove of insights.” – Jonathan Culpeper, Lancaster University “Exploring Machiavellian politics from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics and sociological role theory, Urszula Kizelbach’s study sheds interesting new light on Shakespeare’s stage kings. Her discussion of the strategic uses of polite speech is a particularly welcome addition to our thinking about Shakespeare’s English history plays. A promising new voice in European Shakespeare studies!” – Andreas Höfele, Munich University