This study of the political and romantic impulses of Shakespeare's tragic characters - including Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and Iago, among others - discusses the overblown ambition of these characters as they embrace cunning and evil in order to acquire power and romance. The excessive ambition shown by these characters fuels action in the plays and significantly contributes to their downfall. In other words, the book interrogates, in a pluralist critical frame, the forces behind the quest for power and romance by Shakespeare's protagonists, and explores how these forces propel the.
Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle illuminates the most iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare's heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and wider careers of the actresses who played them. By bringing together fin-de-siècle performances of Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian drama for the first time, this book illuminates the vital ways in which fin-de-siècle Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other. Actresses' movements between Shakespeare and fin-de-siècle roles reveal the collisions and unexpected consonances between apparently independent areas of the fin-de-siècle repertory. Performances including Ellen Terry's Lady Macbeth, Madge Kendal's Rosalind, and Lillie Langtry's Cleopatra illuminate fin-de-siècle Shakespeare's lively intersections with cultural phenomena including the 'Jack the Ripper' killings, Aestheticism, the suicide craze, and the rise of metropolitan department stores. If, as previous studies have shown, Shakespeare was everywhere in Victorian culture, Sophie Duncan explores the surprising ways in which late-Victorian culture, from Dracula to pornography, and from Ruskin to the suffragettes, inflected Shakespeare. Via a wealth of unpublished archival material, Duncan reveals women's creative networks at the fin de siècle, and how Shakespearean performance traditions moved between actresses via little-studied performance genealogies. At the same time, controversial new stage business made fin-de-siècle Shakespeare as much a crucible for debates over gender roles and sexuality as plays by Ibsen and Shaw. Increasingly, actresses' creative networks encompassed suffragist activists, who took personal inspiration from star Shakespearean actresses. From a Salome-esque Juliet to a feminist Paulina, fin-de-siècle actresses created cultural legacies which Shakespeare-in-performance still negotiates today.
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: A, University of Edinburgh, course: Tragedy, History and Sovereignty in Late Medieval and Early Modern Poetry and Drama, 18 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Building on the assumption that differences between the sexes in tragedy are defined through competing representations of heroism, this paper shall take a closer look at the representation of gender in two premodern tragedies, Shakespeare's Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. The aim of this paper shall be to provide a short introduction to (Shakespeare) feminist criticism, which will be supplemented with an overview of various notable instances of the representation of gender in these two works.
Balancing the Scales, a book of essays by faculty members of Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, is an exploration of the manipulation and transformation of symbolic concepts of women. A multidisciplinary collection, representing Art History, English, Spanish Language and Literature, Psychology, and Theology, this book hopes to raise awareness of the historical perception of women before and after the so-called patriarchal revolution. In the eighth century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod changed the character of Pandora, a manifestation of the Great Earth Mother, into Pandora, the bringer of evil. This fundamental change in the nature of the female archetype influenced the biblical writers and their depiction of Eve. In the medieval period, artistic renderings of the Whore of Babylon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun resulted in cultic images of women as either whore (Eve) or pure virgin (Mary). The apparitions and miraculous images of the Black Madonna at Montserrat and Guadalupe show the persistence of the divine feminine in popular culture even as institutional religion denies her existence. The story of Cleopatra breaks open the question of why strong women are seen as frightening. The essays conclude with psychological study of the imbalance induced by millennia of patriarchal domination, resulting in the loss of the sacred feminine.
Women of Will is a fierce and funny exploration of Shakespeare’s understanding of the feminine. Tina Packer, one of our foremost Shakespeare experts, shows that Shakespeare began, in his early comedies, by writing women as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no independence of thought. The women of the history plays are much more interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc. Then, with the extraordinary Juliet, there is a dramatic shift: suddenly Shakespeare’s women have depth, motivation, and understanding of life more than equal to that of the men. As Shakespeare ceases to write women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters. Wondering if Shakespeare had fallen in love (Packer considers with whom, and what she may have been like), the author observes that from Juliet on, Shakespeare’s characters demonstrate that when women and men are equal in status and passion, they can—and do—change the world.
William Shakespeare explores political survival as a question of interaction at court in King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Through a discussion of authority as an element that is distinct from power, this book offers a new perspective on the importance of acts of persuasion and the contribution the late tragedies make to Shakespeare’s portrayal of monarchy. It argues that the most productive uses of the material power to judge or reward are those that reinforce royal authority and establish the monarch at the centre of the web of noble relationships. In the late tragedies, rulership is exercised at court. It acquires a nature of its own as the interaction of powerful and potentially powerful individuals among the nobility. The persuasive exercise of authority complements the tangible power that is founded on the monarch’s material resources, so that consent to the monarch’s supremacy is obtained through various discourses of justification and the performance of the monarch’s social role. Shakespeare’s combination of emotional intimacy with political concerns becomes central to the tragedies of these three plays when the failure to establish control over power and authority leads to the breakdown of established values and political traditions.
First published in 1986. 'Impressively open to the complexity of cultural discourses, to the ways in which one discursive form may function as a screen for another above all to the political entailment of genre.' Stephen Greenblatt. What is the relation between literary and political power? How do the symbolic dimensions of social practice and the social dimensions of artistic practice relate to one another? Power on Display considers Shakespeare's progression from romantic comedies and history plays to tragedy and romance in the light of the general process of cultural change in the period.
While considering Shakespeare's earliest attempts at tragedy in Richard III and Titus Andronicus, this volume covers the major tragic period, giving special attention to Othello.