'Shakespeare in Art' looks at the huge variety of painters who made Shakespeare's extremes of passion, his evocations of nature, his spirit world and his eternally familiar characters the subjects of their own work. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Western culture.
Othello remains one of Shakespeare's most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlight’s the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has. In twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him. The first play in the Seeing Shakespeare Series, Othello is illustrated by English contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Future titles in the series include A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Marcel Dzama and The Merchant of Venice with images by Jordan Wolfson.
The Folger Shakespeare Library contains the finest collection of Shakespearean art ever assembled. Its 200 paintings include scenes from Shakespeare's plays, portraits of the actors, and portraits of the playwright and his contemporaries--works painted by artists including Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, Thomas Sully, George Romney, and Thomas Nast. This lovely volume is an analysis, history, and catalogue of this important collection. It includes 34 color plates and several hundred b&w figures. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
From the works of the English language's greatest playwright comes this stunning gallery of immortal scenes: Romeo and Juliet on the balcony, mad Ophelia wreathed in flowers, Macbeth's encounter with the witches, and other vignettes. More than 120 (85 in full-color) illustrations include the published works of many artists, drawn from a dozen plays and showcasing a rich diversity of imaginative styles and treatments. Highlights include images by Arthur Rackham and W. Heath Robinson from A Midsummer Night's Dream; John Austen's interpretations of Hamlet; and episodes from The Tempest by Edmund Dulac and Walter Crane. Other featured artists include Charles Robinson, Frank Papé, Charles Folkard, Louis Rhead, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Images from each drama are preceded by a brief introduction to the work and are accompanied by captions that identify the scene and artist, as well as the illustration's date.
Do you long to be seductive? Have a desire to be seduced? Then “let lips do what hands do” and put into practice the most enticing baubles of seduction ever written. Shakespeare and the Art of Verbal Seduction contains the Bard’s best seducing lines to cajole, charm, and even proposition the object of your desire. Shakespeare is the master of persuasion. He induces the hardest of hearts to give up mind, body, and soul with a brilliant flash of words. Here they’re collected for you, his little miracles of language, arranged in ten strategies for every stage of a love affair, from first encounter to the full throes of passion. Never again let your desire flounder in bad come-ons. Learn the art of seduction from the greatest seducer of all time, and get what you want.
Set in an enchanted forest, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the ideal subject for artist Marcel Dzama, whose work frequently references dreams, fairy tales, and mythical worlds. Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s celebrated romantic comedy intertwines multiple narratives under the influence of transformation and witchcraft. The play is often staged with actors wearing animal masks, an aspect which appeals particularly to Dzama, whose work is characterized by the fusion of human and animal, fantasy and reality. The second title in David Zwirner Books’s Seeing Shakespeare series revisits the ultimate fairy tale through the eyes of a contemporary artist who feels a special affinity for its imagery.
Critical investigation into the rubric of 'Shakespeare and the visual arts' has generally focused on the influence exerted by the works of Shakespeare on a number of artists, painters, and sculptors in the course of the centuries. Drawing on the poetics of intertextuality and profiting from the more recent concepts of cultural mobility and permeability between cultures in the early modern period, this volume’s tripartite structure considers instead the relationship between Renaissance material arts, theatre, and emblems as an integrated and intermedial genre, explores the use and function of Italian visual culture in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and questions the appropriation of the arts in the production of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By studying the intermediality between theatre and the visual arts, the volume extols drama as a hybrid genre, combining the figurative power of imagery with the plasticity of the acting process, and explains the tri-dimensional quality of the dramatic discourse in the verbal-visual interaction, the stagecraft of the performance, and the natural legacy of the iconographical topoi of painting’s cognitive structures. This methodolical approach opens up a new perspective in the intermedial construction of Shakespearean and early modern drama, extending the concept of theatrical intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their social-cultural resonance. An afterword written by an expert in the field, a rich bibliography of primary and secondary literature, and a detailed Index round off the volume.
Grammar-school students in Shakespeare's time were taught to recognise the two hundred figures of speech that Renaissance scholars had derived from Latin and Greek sources (from amphibologia through onomatopoeia to zeugma). This knowledge was one element in their thorough grounding in the liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, known as the trivium. In Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language Sister Miriam Joseph writes: "The extraordinary power, vitality, and richness of Shakespeare's language are due in part to his genius, in part to the fact that the unsettled linguistic forms of his age promoted to an unusual degree the spirit of creativeness, and in part to the theory of composition then prevailing . . . The purpose of this study is to present to the modern reader the general theory of composition current in Shakespeare's England." The author then lays out those figures of speech in simple, understandable patterns and explains each one with examples from Shakespeare. Her analysis of his plays and poems illustrates that the Bard knew more about rhetoric than perhaps anyone else. Originally published in 1947, this book is a classic.
This Perceptive Study Of Shakespeare By Dowden Remains Unsurpassed. It Is Not An Isolated Work But An Important Landmark In Scholarly Criticism On Shakespeare. Dowden Makes A Judicious Use Of Shakespeare S Intellectual Biography And Connects The Study Of Shakespeare S Works With An Inquiry About The Personality Of The Writer And Growth Of His Mind And Character. The Critic Is Careful In Keeping The Identities Of Shakespeare And His Characters Distinct Though He Skillfully Traces The Proclivities Of Shakespeare S Characters In The Spiritual Tendencies Or Rabits Of Their Creator. In View Of The Range Of Shakespeare S Characters, From John Falstaff To Hamlet, From Lady Macbeth To Cordelia, It Is An Achievement Far Beyond The Scope Of An Extraordinary Intellectual Exercise.By And Large, Dowden Adheres To The Chronological Method Of Studying Shakespeare S Writings. This Makes The Task Of The Student And Reader Easier. References Can Be Made To The Individual Plays And To Their Group Affiliations As Tragedies, Comedies And Historics Readily.Dowden Is Free From Modern Day Tendency To Overuse Academic Jargon. There Is No Rigid Theoretical Framework To Which Shakespeare Has Been Made To Bend And Bow. On The Other Hand, We Notice An Interesting Pattern Of What The Author Himself Describes As The Struggle Between Blood And Judgement Through His Study Of Shakespeare S Plays Which Was Also A Great Affair Of Shakespeare S Life. Dowden Shows Us Decisively That Shakespeare S Creative Response To Life Rested Upon A Purely Human Basis And He Refused To Render Into Art The Dogmas Of Either Catholicism Or Protestantism Even Though He Lived In An Age Marked With Religious Controversies And His Personal Sympathies Were With Protestantism.The Chapter Growth Of Shakespeare S Mind And Art Is An Unmatched Contribution To The Critical Understanding Of Shakespeare S Personality As The Greatest Dramatist And Playwright Of The World.Dowden S Critical Commentary On Shakespeare Is Comprehensive And Wide-Ranging And Full Of Insights. No Important Aspect Of His Dramatic Art Has Remained Untouched As Is Evident From His Treatment Of Shakespeare S Humour. He Insightfully Observes That The Character And Spiritual History Of A Man Who Is Endowed With A Capacity For Humorous Appreciation Of The World Must Differ Throughout And In Every Particular From That Of The Man Whose Moral Nature Has Never Rippled Over With Gerid Laughter. And In This Distinctive Endowment Dowden Seeks The Source Of Shakespeare S Unique Genius.Abandoning Metaphysics And Abstractions, Dowden Turns To Actual Life Of The World As Viewed And Depicted By Shakespeare, To The Real Men And Women Of His Plays And Explores The Sources Of Their Emotion, Thought And Action.Shakespeare-His Mind And Art Has Carved For Itself A Permanent Niche In The Shakespearean Critical Canon.