What's Hecuba to Him?
What's Hecuba to Him?

Author: Eva M. Dadlez

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0271039817

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Fiction transports us. We inhabit new worlds in our imagination, adopt perspectives not our own, and even respond emotionally to persons and events that we know are not real. The very nature of our emotional engagement with fiction, says E. M. Dadlez, attests to the possibility of its moral significance, just as the nature of our imaginative engagement makes us collaborators in the creation of the worlds we imagine. This book engages contemporary debate over the seeming irrationality or inauthenticity of our emotional response to fiction, examining the many positions taken in this debate and arguing that we can understand the relation between cognition and emotion without devaluing our emotional responses to fiction. It takes Hamlet's famous query as the first step in an analytic philosophical inquiry and, by considering some of the answers that derive from that question, arrives at a set of necessary conditions for an emotional response to fiction. What Hamlet's player feels for Hecuba, proposes Dadlez, is no more illusory than what we feel for Hamlet; that the actor weeps for Hecuba reflects both our capacity to envision and understand a seemingly limitless variety of human situations&—to empathize with others&—and the capacity of fiction to facilitate such understanding. What's Hecuba to Him? is an enticingly written work that opens an entire philosophical arena to literary scholars and illuminates the significance that literature has for our moral life.

The First Two Quartos of Hamlet
The First Two Quartos of Hamlet

Author: Margrethe Jolly

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-08-08

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 078647887X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It is nearly two centuries since the first quarto of Hamlet was rediscovered, yet there is still no consensus about its relationship to the second quarto. Indeed, the first quarto, the least frequently read Hamlet, has been dismissed as "corrupt," "inferior" or like "a mutilated corpse," even though in performance it has been described as "the absolute dynamo behind the play." Currently one hypothesis dominates explanations about the quartos' interrelationship, supposing that the first quarto (published 1603) was reconstructed from memory by one or more actors who had performed minor roles in a version of the second quarto (published 1604-5). The present study reports on a detailed linguistic reassessment of the principal arguments for memorial reconstruction. The evidence--including a three way comparison between the underlying French source in Les Histoires Tragiques and the two quartos, and the informal features and specific grammatical aspects, and a documented memorial reconstruction in 1779--does not support the dominant hypothesis. The cumulative evidence suggests that the earliest scholars to examine the first quarto were right: the 1603 Hamlet came first, and the second quarto is a substantial, later revision.

Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will
Shakespeare and Interpretation, or What You Will

Author: Brayton Polka

Publisher: University of Delaware

Published: 2011-06-24

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 161149043X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Brayton Polka takes both a textual and theoretical approach to seven plays of Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. He calls upon the Bible and the ideas of major European thinkers, above all, Kierkegaard and Spinoza, to argue that the concept of interpretation, underlying both Shakespeare's plays and our own lives, is the golden rule of the Bible: the command to love your neighbor as yourself.

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare

Author: William Shakespeare

Publisher: Barnes & Noble Publishing

Published: 1989-05-19

Total Pages: 1286

ISBN-13: 9781586635565

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. -- from Sonnet 18 No home should be without this: every play, from the early histories to the sad, wise Winter's Tale and The Tempest; every exquisitely crafted sonnet; every long poem (such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece) written by the greatest writer in the English language. This edition of the Bard of Avon's complete works is a facsimile of the definitive Shakespeare Head edition published originally in Oxford, England. All the plays are arranged in chronological order of their composition, rather than by genre, so that the evolution of Shakespeare's monumental genius can be more easily followed and appreciated.