Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments
Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments

Author: Robert G. Hunter

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011-03-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0820338540

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Robert G. Hunter maintains that the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Elizabethan mind was in great part responsible for the emergence of the outstanding tragedies of the age. Luther and Calvin caused men to ask how God can be just if man is not free, and Shakespeare's greatest tragedies confront the vexing problems posed by these altered conceptions of man's freedom of will and God's providential control of natural circumstance. Shakespeare's audiences were not single-minded. He wrote for semi-Pelagians, Augustinians, Calvinists, and men and women who did not know what to think. Confl icting certainties, doubts, and uncertainties were his raw material, both within his mind and the minds of the audience. Hunter shows how Shakespeare uses the major attitudes toward God's judgment in creating Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He notes that Shakespeare's different viewpoints are the heart of the tragedies themselves. Even after Shakespeare's imaginative considerations of the mysteries, the tragedies seem to consistently provide questions rather than answers, and what they inspire in their beholders is more likely to be doubt than faith.

Christian Settings in Shakespeare's Tragedies
Christian Settings in Shakespeare's Tragedies

Author: D. Douglas Waters

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780838635285

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Battenhouse's Shakespearean tragedy: Its art and Christian premises, Irving Ribner's Patterns in Shakespearian tragedy, Virgil K. Whitaker's The mirror up to nature: The techniques of Shakespeare's tragedies, and Robert Grams Hunter's Shakespeare and the mystery of God's judgments. Waters questions, for example, Battenhouse's validity of Christian theological and didactic emphases on the old purgation theory of catharsis. His approach differs also from Northrop Frye's views on the tragedies in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, an archetypal approach to representative plays including the tragedies.

Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare
Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare

Author: Robert Rentoul ReedJr.

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0813186544

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Divine retribution, Robert Reed argues, is a principal driving force in Shakespeare's English history plays and three of his major tragedies. Reed finds evidence of the playwright's growing ingenuity and maturing skill in his treatment of the crime of political homicide, its impact on events, and God's judgment on the criminal. Reed's analysis focuses upon Tudor concepts that he shows were familiar to all Elizabethans—the biblical principle of inherited guilt, the doctrine that God is the fountainhead of retribution, with man merely His instrument, and the view that conscience serves a fundamentally divine function—and he urges us to look at Shakespeare within the context of his time, avoiding the too-frequent tendency of twentieth-century critics to force a modern world view on the plays. Heaven's power of vengeance provides an essential unifying theme to the plays of the two historical tetralogies, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth. By analyzing these plays in the light of values held by Shakespeare's contemporaries, Reed has made a substantial contribution toward clarifying our understanding of the plays and of Elizabethan England.

In the Company of Shakespeare
In the Company of Shakespeare

Author: Thomas Moisan

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780838639023

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This book is an anthology of critical essays written about English literature during the Renaissance (or the 'early-modern' period). It focuses on Shakespeare's poetry and plays, including the 'Sonnets', 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'King Lear', 'Othello', 'Measure for Measure', and 'Timon of Athens'. Also examined are the publication of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, William Cartwright's play 'The Royal Slave', and James Halliwell-Phillips, one of the central figures in the Shakespearean textual tradition.

King Lear
King Lear

Author: Jeffrey Kahan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-04-18

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1135973652

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Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink

Godless Shakespeare
Godless Shakespeare

Author: Eric S. Mallin

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0826490425

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Polemic new reading of Shakespeare focusing on atheism, scepticism and belief.

Shakespeare
Shakespeare

Author: Herbert R. Coursen

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780838637746

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The purpose of this book is to examine recent productions of Shakespeare on stage and film and to lay out some interpretive guidelines for responding to the scripts as recreated in these two very different formats and within the conflicted environment of shifting critical paradigms. The two traditions - Shakespeare on stage and Shakespeare on film - have experienced a midair collision with postmodernism. The results are beginning to be chronicled.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion

Author: Hannibal Hamlin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1107172594

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A wide-ranging yet accessible investigation into the importance of religion in Shakespeare's works, from a team of eminent international scholars.

Shakespeare's Literary Authorship
Shakespeare's Literary Authorship

Author: Patrick Cheney

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-06-26

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0521881668

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This book considers Shakespeare as a literary figure, analysing his full professional career, both poetry and plays.

Reformations of the Body
Reformations of the Body

Author: J. Waldron

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-02-12

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1137313129

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This project takes the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theatre and overturns a longstanding notion about theatrical phenomenology in this period.