[PDF] Shakespeares History Plays eBook

Author : Michael Hattaway
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 34,55 MB
Release : 2002-12-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521775397

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Publisher Description (unedited publisher data) Shakespeare's history plays have been performed more in recent years than ever before, in Britain, North America, and in Europe. This volume provides an accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's history and Roman plays. It is attentive throughout to the plays as they have been performed over the centuries since they were written. The first part offers accounts of the genre of the history play, of Renaissance historiography, of pageants and masques, and of women's roles, as well as comparisons with history plays in Spain and the Netherlands. Chapters in the second part look at individual plays as well as other Shakespearean texts which are closely related to the histories. The Companion offers a full bibliography, genealogical tables, and a list of principal and recurrent characters. It is a comprehensive guide for students, researchers and theatre-goers alike.

Author : Neema Parvini
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 26,16 MB
Release : 2017-11-01
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
ISBN : 147442354X

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Shakespeare's History Plays boldly moves criticism of Shakespeare's history plays beyond anti-humanist theoretical approaches. This important intervention in the critical and theoretical discourse of Shakespeare studies summarises, evaluates and ultimately calls time on the mode of criticism that has prevailed in Shakespeare studies over the past thirty years. It heralds a new, more dynamic way of reading Shakespeare as a supremely intelligent and creative political thinker, whose history plays address and illuminate the very questions with which cultural historicists have been so preoccupied since the 1980s. In providing bold and original readings of the first and second tetralogies (Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2), the book reignites old debates and re-energises recent bids to humanise Shakespeare and to restore agency to the individual in the critical readings of his plays

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 478 pages
File Size : 40,50 MB
Release : 2013-07-18
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1627932534

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A collection containing Alls Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and The History of Troilus and Cressida

Author : Robert Watt
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 44,43 MB
Release : 2014-06-11
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1317876148

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Shakespeare's history plays are central to his dramatic achievement. In recent years they have become more widely studied than ever, stimulating intensely contested interpretations, due to their relevance to central contemporary issues such as English, national identities and gender roles. Interpretations of the history plays have been transformed since the 1980s by new theoretically-informed critical approaches. Movements such as New Historicism and cultural materialism, as well as psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches, have swept away the humanist consensus of the mid-twentieth century with its largely conservative view of the plays. The last decade has seen an emergence of feminist and gender-based readings of plays which were once thought overwhelmingly masculine in their concerns. This book provides an up-to-date critical anthology representing the best work from each of the modern theoretical perspectives. The introduction outlines the changing debate in an area which is now one of the liveliest in Shakespearean criticism.

Author : Larry S. Champion
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 39,97 MB
Release : 2011-04-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 082033846X

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Larry S. Champion examines Shakespeare's English history plays and describes the structural devices through which Shakespeare controls the audience's angle of vision and its response to the pattern of historical events. Champion observes the experimentation between stage worlds and the significance of a dramatic technique unique to the history play—one that combines the detachment of a documentary necessary for a broad intellectual view of history and the simultaneous engagement between character and spectator. Champion sees a conscious bifurcation occurring in Shakespeare's dramaturgy after Richard II. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare continues to focus on the psychological analysis and internalized protagonist which lead to his major tragic achievements. In King John and Henry IV, the playwright develops a middle ground between the polarities of Henry VI, in which the flat, onedimensional characters essentially serve the purposes of the narrative, and the tragedies, in which the spectator's consuming interest is in the developing centralfigure whose critical moments they share. Champion sees Henry V as the culmination of Shakespeare's e fforts in the English history play.

Author : Warren Chernaik
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,79 MB
Release : 2007-10-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521855071

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An accessible and lively 2007 introduction to Shakespeare's history plays and their tradition on stage and film.

Author : John Julius Norwich
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 438 pages
File Size : 31,7 MB
Release : 2001-03-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0743200314

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Compares the historical kings with their portrayal in Shakespeare's plays.

Author : Tim Spiekerman
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 33,10 MB
Release : 2001-01-25
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780791448687

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Explores the continuing relevance of important political themes in five of Shakespeare's English History plays.

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
Page : 987 pages
File Size : 35,39 MB
Release : 2014-10-28
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1466884363

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It is part of Shakespeare's extraordinary contribution to our culture that, through his dramas based on English history, he played a unique part in forming our view of ourselves and our nationhood. From King John, in which through Magna Carta the king's absolute power was first limited and the people's freedoms assured, to--almost in his own lifetime--Henry VIII, Shakespeare wrote a series of ten plays portraying the course of history. It represents almost one third of his entire dramatic output. The overarching theme of these plays is the vital importance of the sovereign's legitimacy if the nation is to be stable. They cover revolutionary times and events--the deposition and murder of Richard II, the Wars of the Roses, the usurping of the throne by Richard III--but they always affirm the principle that a legitimate king, circumscribed by an agreed constituion, is the only proper guarantee of the nation's liberties. There are many other ways in which Shakespeare's patriotism has become definitive. In Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech to the troops before Agincourt, for example, or John of gaunt's 'scepter'd isle' speech, a sense of Englishness is expressed which still lives in English minds today. The E;izabethan's pride in nationhood was perfectly embodied by Shakespeare, but the poetry of it transcends its own time. In this edition the history plays are brought together with a large group of illustrations which echo and amplify their themes. Gloriously vivid images of England's story are presented here, putting the great plays in a magnificent setting.

Author : A. J. Hoenselaars
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 15,88 MB
Release : 2004-09-23
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780521829021

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This volume, with a foreword by Dennis Kennedy, addresses a range of attitudes to Shakespeare's English history plays in Britain and abroad from the early seventeenth century to the present day. It concentrates on the play texts as well as productions, translations and adaptations of them. The essays explore the multiple points of intersection between the English history they recount and the experience of British and other national cultures, establishing the plays as genres not only relevant to the political and cultural history of Britain but also to the history of nearly every nation worldwide. The plays have had a rich international reception tradition but critics and theatre historians abroad, those practising 'foreign' Shakespeare, have tended to ignore these plays in favour of the comedies and tragedies. By presenting the British and foreign Shakespeare traditions side by side, this volume seeks to promote a more finely integrated world Shakespeare.