Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama

Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama

Author: M. Fahey

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-08-31

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0230308805

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Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama explores the fruitful and potentially unruly nature of metaphorical utterances in Shakespearean drama, with analyses of Othello , Titus Andronicus , King Henry IV Part 1 , Macbeth , Hamlet , and The Tempest.


Shakespeare and Social Theory

Shakespeare and Social Theory

Author: BRADD. SHORE

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-23

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9781032017174

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This book provides a bridge between Shakespeare Studies and classical social theory, opening up readings of Shakespeare to a new audience outside of literary studies and the humanities. Shakespeare has long been known as a 'great thinker' and this book reads his plays through the lens of an anthropologist, revealing new connections between Shakespeare's plays and the lives we now lead. Close readings of a selection of frequently studied plays - Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar and King Lear - engage with the plays in detail while connecting them with some of the biggest questions we all ask ourselves, about love, friendship, ritual, language, human interactions and the world around us. The plays are examined through various social theories including performance theory, cognitive theory, semiotics, exchange theory and structuralism. The book concludes with a consideration of how "the new astronomy" of his day and developments in optics changed the very idea of "perspective," and shaped Shakespeare's approach to embedding social theory in his dramatic texts. This accessible and engaging book will appeal to those approaching Shakespeare from outside literary studies, but will also be valuable to literature students approaching Shakespeare for the first time, or looking for a new angle on the plays.


Metaphoric Resonance in Shakespearean Tragedy

Metaphoric Resonance in Shakespearean Tragedy

Author: Myron Stagman

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-10-02

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1443816183

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An occasional prefigurement and echo was hardly unknown before Shakespeare. But the vast echoism—continuing forward and backward references—utilized in certain Shakespearean tragedies, was rare if unknown before him. Who, even now, does this? Two examples of messages conveyed via metaphoric resonance: (1) an element of the weight metaphoric trail in Coriolanus: The protagonist says scornfully to the Citizens in the first Act: He that depends upon your favours swims with fins of lead. In the second Act, Coriolanus more cautiously, deceptively, remarks to the plebeians' tribune Brutus: Your people, I love them as they weigh. The full import of this statement would be lost without knowledge of the metaphoric resonance, which tells us he is not impartial. (2) Richard II, Act II, scene 1: John of Gaunt begins his famous prophesying-and-punning speech to King Richard: “O, how [my] name fits my composition! ... gaunt in being old. ... and therein fasting, hast thou made me gaunt. Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave.” Shakespeare set up other prophesies in the play with this one by John of Gaunt. Thus, in the fourth scene of Act II, a Captain declares, “And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change.” The playwright has been criticized for having Gaunt pun at such a time, but name a better way for the playful Shakespeare to tip off the audience to a shrewdly resonant “lean-look'd prophets” two scenes away.


Error in Shakespeare

Error in Shakespeare

Author: Alice Leonard

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-27

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 3030351807

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The traditional view of Shakespeare’s mastery of the English language is alive and well today. This is an effect of the eighteenth-century canonisation of his works, and subsequently Shakespeare has come to be perceived as the owner of the vernacular. These entrenched attitudes prevent us from seeing the actual substance of the text, and the various types of error that it contains and even constitute it. This book argues that we need to attend to error to interpret Shakespeare’s disputed material text, political-dramatic interventions and famous literariness. The consequences of ignoring error are especially significant in the study of Shakespeare, as he mobilises the rebellious, marginal, and digressive potential of error in the creation of literary drama.


Shakespeare’s Mirrors

Shakespeare’s Mirrors

Author: Edward Evans

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-26

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 104012822X

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Clear mirrors and The Geneva Bible, revolutionary innovations of the Elizabethan age, inspired Shakespeare’s drive towards a new purpose for drama. Shakespeare reversed the conventional mirror metaphor for drama, implying drama cannot reflect the substance of human nature, and developed a method of characterization, through metadrama, self-awareness and soliloquy, to project St. Paul’s idea of conscience onto the Elizabethan stage. This revolutionary method of characterization, aesthetic existence beyond performance, has long been sensed but remains frustratingly uncategorized. Shakespeare’s Mirrors charts the invention of a drama that staged the unstageable: St. Paul’s metaphysical conception of human nature glimpsed through a looking glass darkly.


Theater as Metaphor

Theater as Metaphor

Author: Elena Penskaya

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-05-20

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 3110622033

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The papers of the present volume investigate the potential of the metaphor of life as theater for literary, philosophical, juridical and epistemological discourses from the Middle Ages through modernity, and focusing on traditions as manifold as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Latin-American.


Impressive Shakespeare

Impressive Shakespeare

Author: Harry Newman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-01-16

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1317118324

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Impressive Shakespeare reassesses Shakespeare’s relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays’ engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms through which drama was thought to "imprint" early modern audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories, and—looking to our own cultural moment—shows how Shakespeare has been historically constructed as an "impressive" dramatist. Through material readings of four plays—Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale—Harry Newman argues that Shakespeare deploys the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the value of his plays to audiences and readers, and that in turn the language of impression has shaped, and continues to shape, Shakespeare’s critical afterlife. The book pushes the boundaries of what we understand by "print culture", and challenges assumptions about the emergence of concepts now central to Shakespeare’s perceived canonical value, such as penetrating characterisation, poetic transformation, and literary fatherhood. Harry Newman’s suggestive analysis of techniques and tropes of sealing, coining and printing produces a revelatory account of Shakespearean creative poetics. It’s sustainedly startling in its rereading of familiar lines - but the chapter I found most original is on Measure for Measure: Newman is the first critic to attempt to interpret the play’s authorial status as part of its own thematic and linguistic interrogation of illegitimacy and counterfeiting. He makes authorship matter in a literary and creative, rather than a quantitative and statistical, sense. Impressive Shakespeare is a brilliant scholarly debut. - Emma Smith Editor, Shakespeare Survey Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Hertford College, Oxford


Routledge Revivals: The Shakespearean Metaphor (1990)

Routledge Revivals: The Shakespearean Metaphor (1990)

Author: Ralph Berry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 131540947X

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First published in 1978, this book represents a study of the ways in which Shakespeare exploits the possibilities of metaphor. In a series of studies ranging from the early to the mature Shakespeare, the author concentrates on metaphor as a controlling structure — the extent to which a certain metaphoric idea informs and organises the drama. These studies turn constantly to the relations between symbol and metaphor, literal and figurative, and examine key plays such as Richard III, King John, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus. They also provide a key to The Tempest which is analysed in terms of power and possession — the dominant motif.