Shakespeare's Late Plays

Shakespeare's Late Plays PDF Author: Richards Jennifer Richards
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147447201X
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
This new collection reflects a resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's plays performed between 1608 and 1613: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True (Henry VIII), The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio. It offers a broad range of new, historicist approaches, touching upon key topics in current Shakespearean studies, such as kinship relations, manliness, magic, medico-politics, nationalism, rhetoric, schism, sexuality and staging conventions. The plays are explored both individually and within generic, thematic and chronological groups. Each author combines new research with their experience of teaching the plays, offering innovative approaches to some well-known works, as well as encouraging readers to explore less familiar dramas such as Pericles, Cymbeline, All is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The volume is unusual in its coverage of the lost 'late' play Cardenio, and considers its significance for our conception of the 'lateness' of these plays. This book will fill a large gap in the market for a broad-ranging critical introduction to this important and increasingly popular area in Shakespeare's work, and is suitable as a textbook for undergraduate, graduate and more general readers.

Shakespeare's Late Plays

Shakespeare's Late Plays PDF Author: Richards Jennifer Richards
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147447201X
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
This new collection reflects a resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's plays performed between 1608 and 1613: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True (Henry VIII), The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio. It offers a broad range of new, historicist approaches, touching upon key topics in current Shakespearean studies, such as kinship relations, manliness, magic, medico-politics, nationalism, rhetoric, schism, sexuality and staging conventions. The plays are explored both individually and within generic, thematic and chronological groups. Each author combines new research with their experience of teaching the plays, offering innovative approaches to some well-known works, as well as encouraging readers to explore less familiar dramas such as Pericles, Cymbeline, All is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The volume is unusual in its coverage of the lost 'late' play Cardenio, and considers its significance for our conception of the 'lateness' of these plays. This book will fill a large gap in the market for a broad-ranging critical introduction to this important and increasingly popular area in Shakespeare's work, and is suitable as a textbook for undergraduate, graduate and more general readers.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Last Plays

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Last Plays PDF Author: Catherine M. S. Alexander
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139828282
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book

Book Description
Which plays are included under the heading 'Shakespeare's last plays', and when does Shakespeare's 'last' period begin? What is meant by a 'late play', and what are the benefits in defining plays in this way? Reflecting the recent growth of interest in late studies, and recognising the gaps in accessible scholarship on this area, in this book leading international Shakespeare scholars address these and many other questions. The essays locate Shakespeare's last plays - single and co-authored - in the period of their composition, consider the significant characteristics of their Jacobean context, and explore the rich afterlives, on stage, in print and other media of The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII. The volume opens with a historical timeline that places the plays in the contexts of contemporary political events, theatrical events, other cultural milestones, Shakespeare's life and that of his playing company, the King's Men.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare PDF Author: Kiernan Ryan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317889614
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book

Book Description
This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is at stake in the choice of a particular critical approach. It allows the student to compare the strengths and limitations of a deconstructive and a feminist reading of the same romance, or to test the plausibility of one psychoanalytic angle on the last plays against another. The headnotes that preface the essays highlight their distinctive slants on Shakespearean romance, unpack the theoretical assumptions that steer their interpretations, and throw into relief the key points at which their authors collide or converge. The editor's introduction places the essays in the context of twentieth-century criticism of the last plays and makes a powerful case for a fundamental reappraisal of Shakespearean romance. The comprehensive, fully annotated bibliography provides an unrivalled guide to further reading on all four plays.

Shakespeare's Late Style

Shakespeare's Late Style PDF Author: Russ McDonald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139457616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Get Book

Book Description
When Shakespeare gave up tragedy around 1607 and turned to the new form we call romance or tragicomedy, he created a distinctive poetic idiom that often bewildered audiences and readers. The plays of this period, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, as well as Shakespeare's part in the collaborations with John Fletcher (Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen), exhibit a challenging verse style - verbally condensed, metrically and syntactically sophisticated, both conversational and highly wrought. In Shakespeare's Late Style, McDonald anatomizes the components of this late style, illustrating in a series of topically organized chapters the contribution of such features as ellipsis, grammatical suspension, and various forms of repetition. Resisting the sentimentality that frequently attends discussion of an artist's 'late' period, Shakespeare's Late Style shows how the poetry of the last plays reveals their creator's ambivalent attitude towards art, language, men and women, the theatre, and his own professional career.

Shakespeare's Late Work

Shakespeare's Late Work PDF Author: Raphael Lyne
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191532797
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book

Book Description
Shakespeare's Late Work is a detailed reading of the plays written at the end of Shakespeare's career, centring on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Unlike many previous studies it considers all the late work, including Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the revised Folio version of King Lear, and even what can be ascertained about the lost Cardenio. From this broadened canon emerge signs of a distinct identity for the late work. Lyne explores how Shakespeare sets great store in grand principles - faith in God, love of family, reverence for monarchs, and belief in theatrical representations of truth. However, there is also a ubiquitous and structuring irony whereby such principles are questioned and doubted. Audiences and readers are left with a difficult but empowering decision whether to believe, or to question, or to accommodate both faith and scepticism. Alongside this interest in the new and characteristically 'late' qualities of this phase in Shakespeare's career, Shakespeare's Late Work puts it in a wider cultural context. A chapter on the collaborations and broader dramatic relationships with John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton illuminates how Shakespeare's canon interacts with other writing of its time. A chapter on how the late work revisits and reconsiders themes from earlier plays shows that continuity needs to be remembered alongside novelty. Overall this is an introduction to the key works of this period which advances a new reading of them. They emerge as fascinating and dazzling explorations of their potential and their limitations.

Shakespeares Last Plays

Shakespeares Last Plays PDF Author: F.A. Yates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136354247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 119

Get Book

Book Description
This is Volume VI in the selected works of Frances Yates, providing a new approach to Shakespeare's last plays. First published in 1975, these are a collection of lectures that offer the new thinking about certain ideas concerning Shakespeare's relation to the problemsand thought currents of his times.

Shakespeare's Last Plays

Shakespeare's Last Plays PDF Author: Stephen W. Smith
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739103616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
What were Shakespeare's final thoughts on history, tragedy, and comedy? Shakespeare's Last Plays focuses much needed scholarly attention on Shakespeare's "Late Romances." The work--a collection of newly commissioned essays by leading scholars of classical political philosophy and literature--offers careful textual analysis of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The essays reveal how Shakespeare's thought in these final works compliments, challenges, fulfills, or transforms previously held conceptions of the playwright and his political-philosophical views.

The Late Romances

The Late Romances PDF Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: Bantam Classics
ISBN: 030742183X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 850

Get Book

Book Description
Pericles The first of Shakespeare’s late romances moves spectacularly from one dramatic period to another as the hero, Pericles, sails off to adventure and love, and experiences what for him is a miracle. Cymbeline A favorite romantic drama, this play of a wife unjustly accused of faithlessness moves from a world of intrigue and slander to one of reconciliation and forgiveness, and contains two of Shakespeare’s most poignantly beautiful songs. The Winter's Tale From a darkly melodramatic beginning to a joyous pastoral ending, this romance of a jealous king and his long-suffering queen is superb entertainment, with revelations, plot twists, and a final compelling theatrical moment of discovery. The Tempest This tale of the exiled Duke of Milan, marooned on an enchanted island, is so richly filled with music and magic, romance and comedy, that its theme of love and reconciliation offers a splendid feast for the senses and the heart.

Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613

Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613 PDF Author: Andrew J. Power
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107016193
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book

Book Description
In Late Shakespeare, 1608-1613, leading international Shakespeare scholars provide a contextually informed approach to Shakespeare's last seven plays.

Shakespeare's Lyric Stage

Shakespeare's Lyric Stage PDF Author: Seth Lerer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658254X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book

Book Description
What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances—which should invite consolation, revelation, and connection—somehow fall short of the listener’s expectations? As Seth Lerer shows in this pioneering book, Shakespeare’s late plays invite us to contemplate that very question, offering up lyric as a displaced and sometimes desperate antidote to situations of duress or powerlessness. Lerer argues that the theme of lyric misalignment running throughout The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, and Cymbeline serves a political purpose, a last-ditch effort at transformation for characters and audiences who had lived through witch-hunting, plague, regime change, political conspiracies, and public executions. A deep dive into the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book also explores what Shakespearean lyric is able to recuperate for these “victims of history” by virtue of its disjointed utterances. To this end, Lerer establishes the concept of mythic lyricism: an estranging use of songs and poetry that functions to recreate the past as present, to empower the mythic dead, and to restore a bit of magic to the commonplaces and commodities of Jacobean England. Reading against the devotion to form and prosody common in Shakespeare scholarship, Lerer’s account of lyric utterance’s vexed role in his late works offers new ways to understand generational distance and cultural change throughout the playwright’s oeuvre.