Shakespeare's Symmetries
Shakespeare's Symmetries

Author: James E. Ryan

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 147666370X

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The organization of Shakespeare's plays has challenged, even baffled audiences and critics since the 17th century. Cymbeline has been dismissed as "incoherent." Hamlet "is of no clear shape." And Antony and Cleopatra "bewilders the mind." These judgments result from an incomplete understanding of Shakespeare's constructive practice. It is not the narrative arc alone that organizes the plays but a complex structure of interwoven narrative and thematic actions. While the narrative varies from play to play, thematic actions are invariably created in mirroring pairs around the central scene: A-B-C-B-A. This symmetrical pattern, which can be visualized as an arch with a focal keystone, is the foundation of all of Shakespeare's mature work, as shown through an analysis of the 26 plays in this book. This arch illuminates the structure of plays that have long been puzzling, demonstrating that they are thematically organized and rigorously crafted. It also reveals subtleties otherwise invisible.

Shakespeare's Symmetries
Shakespeare's Symmetries

Author: James E. Ryan

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2016-04-27

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 147662416X

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The organization of Shakespeare's plays has challenged, even baffled audiences and critics since the 17th century. Cymbeline has been dismissed as "incoherent." Hamlet "is of no clear shape." And Antony and Cleopatra "bewilders the mind." These judgments result from an incomplete understanding of Shakespeare's constructive practice. It is not the narrative arc alone that organizes the plays but a complex structure of interwoven narrative and thematic actions. While the narrative varies from play to play, thematic actions are invariably created in mirroring pairs around the central scene: A-B-C-B-A. This symmetrical pattern, which can be visualized as an arch with a focal keystone, is the foundation of all of Shakespeare's mature work, as shown through an analysis of the 26 plays in this book. This arch illuminates the structure of plays that have long been puzzling, demonstrating that they are thematically organized and rigorously crafted. It also reveals subtleties otherwise invisible.

The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose
The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose

Author: Brian Vickers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1136565450

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First published in 1968. This re-issues the revised edition of 1979. The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose is the first detailed study of the use of prose in the plays. It begins by defining the different dramatic and emotional functions which Shakespeare gave to prose and verse, and proceeds to analyse the recurrent stylistic devices used in his prose. The general and particular application of prose is then studied through all the plays, in roughly chronological order.

The Formal Center in Literature
The Formal Center in Literature

Author: Richard Kopley

Publisher: Camden House (NY)

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1640140328

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An investigation of the phenomenon of the framed formal center in literature of the last 180 years, illuminating both the works and correspondences among works of different genres, periods, and nations.

Mutability and Division on Shakespeare's Stage
Mutability and Division on Shakespeare's Stage

Author: Yu Jin Ko

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0874138841

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"The book is at the same time rooted in the theater, and thus relates the theatrical conventions of Shakespeare's time to the thematic matter of the book. In particular, Ko demonstrates how the divisions explored in the plays are related to stage practices like the use of boy-actors and the volatile interplay of illusionistic and non-illusionistic modes of acting. In this context, Ko introduces a new term - charactor - that combines the fictional character and the stage actor and enables a new, nuanced exploration of stage personae."--Jacket.

Symplectic Geometry and Mirror Symmetry
Symplectic Geometry and Mirror Symmetry

Author: Kodŭng Kwahagwŏn (Korea). International Conference

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 940

ISBN-13: 9789812799821

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In 1993, M. Kontsevich proposed a conceptual framework for explaining the phenomenon of mirror symmetry. Mirror symmetry had been discovered by physicists in string theory as a duality between families of three-dimensional Calabi–Yau manifolds. Kontsevich's proposal uses Fukaya's construction of the A∞-category of Lagrangian submanifolds on the symplectic side and the derived category of coherent sheaves on the complex side. The theory of mirror symmetry was further enhanced by physicists in the language of D-branes and also by Strominger–Yau–Zaslow in the geometric set-up of (special) Lagrangian torus fibrations. It rapidly expanded its scope across from geometry, topology, algebra to physics. In this volume, leading experts in the field explore recent developments in relation to homological mirror symmetry, Floer theory, D-branes and Gromov–Witten invariants. Kontsevich-Soibelman describe their solution to the mirror conjecture on the abelian variety based on the deformation theory of A∞-categories, and Ohta describes recent work on the Lagrangian intersection Floer theory by Fukaya–Oh–Ohta–Ono which takes an important step towards a rigorous construction of the A∞-category. There follow a number of contributions on the homological mirror symmetry, D-branes and the Gromov–Witten invariants, e.g. Getzler shows how the Toda conjecture follows from recent work of Givental, Okounkov and Pandharipande. This volume provides a timely presentation of the important developments of recent years in this rapidly growing field.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry

Author: Jonathan Post

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 2204

ISBN-13: 0191665061

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The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains thirty-eight original essays written by leading Shakespeareans around the world. Collectively, these essays seek to return readers to a revivified understanding of Shakespeare's verbal artistry in both the poems and the drama. The volume understands poetry to be not just a formal category designating a particular literary genre but to be inclusive of the dramatic verse as well, and of Shakespeare's influence as a poet on later generations of writers in English and beyond. Focusing on a broad set of interpretive concerns, the volume tackles general matters of Shakespeare's style, earlier and later; questions of influence from classical, continental, and native sources; the importance of words, line, and rhyme to meaning; the significance of songs and ballads in the drama; the place of gender in the verse, including the relationship of Shakespeare's poetry to the visual arts; the different values attached to speaking 'Shakespeare' in the theatre; and the adaptation of Shakespearean verse (as distinct from performance) into other periods and languages. The largest section, with ten essays, is devoted to the poems themselves: the Sonnets, plus 'A Lover's Complaint', the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. If the volume as a whole urges a renewed involvement in the complex matter of Shakespeare's poetry, it does so, as the individual essays testify, by way of responding to critical trends and discoveries made during the last three decades.

Shakespeare Studies
Shakespeare Studies

Author: Susan Zimmerman

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008-09

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780838641798

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Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hard cover that contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. Although the journal maintains a focus on the theatrical milieu of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it is also concerned with Britain's intellectual and cultural connections to the continent, its sociopolitical history, and its place in the emerging globalism of the period. In addition to articles, the journal includes substantial reviews of significant publications dealing with these issues, as well as theoretical studies relevant to scholars of early modem culture. Volume XXXVI features another in the journal's ongoing series of Forums, in which scholars exchange views on an issue of importance to early modern studies. Organized and introduced by Patrick Cheney, the Forum is entitled The Return of the Author and includes commentary by ten contributors considering the issue of authorship in a postmodern milieu. Volume XXXVI also features essays on Shakespeare's Hamlet, Henry V, and Richard II and an essay on Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, as well as fourteen reviews by scholars on such wide-ranging topics as early modern cultural capitals, the Jamestown project, shaping sound in Renaissance England, the places of London comedy, Shakespeare's Shylock, and the connections between animals, rationality, and humanity in Shakespeare's time. Susan Zimmerman is Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Garrett Sullivan is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare
Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare

Author: Aureliu Manea

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-21

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1000074145

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In Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare, visionary modernist theatre director Aureliu Manea analyses the theatrical possibilities of Shakespeare. Through nineteen Shakespeare plays, Manea sketches the intellectual parameters, the visual languages, and the emotional worlds of imagined stage interpretations of each; these nineteen short essays are appended by his essay ‘Confessions,’ an autobiographical meditation on the nature of theatre and the role of the director. This captivating book which will be attractive to anyone interested in Shakespeare and modern theatre.

Broken Symmetries
Broken Symmetries

Author: John Freund

Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13:

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This important study makes a convincing case for its thesis that the dramatic form of Shakespeare's plays corresponds to that of a natural system evolving to a more complex state while undergoing symmetry breaking. Drawing upon such key concepts of chaos theory as global agency and self-similarity, the book constructs a methodology which illuminates many problematic aspects of agency in the selected comedies, tragedies, and histories it examines. Each of these genres is shown to reflect the paradoxical dynamics of a chaotic system. This fresh «systems perspective» offers a serious challenge to the structuralist assumptions underlying many current literary approaches.