Shakespeare In Theory And Practice

In these essays, collected here for the first time, renowned critic Catherine Belsey puts theory to work in order to register Shakespeare's powers of seduction, together with his moment in history. Teasing out the meanings of the narrative poems, as well as some of the more familiar plays, she demonstrates the possibilities of an attention to textuality that also draws on the archive. A reading of the Sonnets, written specially for this book, analyses their intricate and ambivalent inscription of desire. Between them, these essays trace the progress of theory in the course of three decades, while a new introduction offers a narrative and analytical overview, from a participant's perspective, of some of its key implications. Written with verve and conviction, this book shows how texts can offer access to the dissonances of the past when theory finds an outcome in practice.

Finally, these assumptions lead to the corollary that such hierarchies are natural and immutable and not fashioned by critics.

The theoretical ferment which has affected literary studies over the last decade has called into question traditional ways of thinking about, classifying and interpreting texts. Shakespeare has been not just the focus of a variety of divergent critical movements within recent years, but also increasingly the locus of emerging debates within, and with, theory itself. This collection of essays, written by distinguished and powerful critics in the fields of literary theory and Shakespeare studies, is intended both for those interested in Shakespeare and for those interested more generally in the emerging debates within contemporary criticism and theory.

In this new monograph, Claire Hansen demonstrates how Shakespeare can be understood as a complex system, and how complexity theory can provide compelling and original readings of Shakespeare’s plays. The book utilises complexity theory to illuminate early modern theatrical practice, Shakespeare pedagogy, and the phenomenon of the Shakespeare ‘myth’. The monograph re-evaluates Shakespeare, his plays, early modern theatre, and modern classrooms as complex systems, illustrating how the lens of complexity offers an enlightening new perspective on diverse areas of Shakespeare scholarship. The book’s interdisciplinary approach enriches our understanding of Shakespeare and lays the foundation for complexity theory in Shakespeare studies and the humanities more broadly.

Part One: Theory and Ideology. Part Two: Theory as Academic Practice: Part Three: Censorship and Teaching Practice.

This book provides a bridge between Shakespeare Studies and classical social theory, opening up readings of Shakespeare to a new audience outside of literary studies and the humanities. Shakespeare has long been known as a 'great thinker' and this book reads his plays through the lens of an anthropologist, revealing new connections between Shakespeare's plays and the lives we now lead. Close readings of a selection of frequently studied plays - Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar and King Lear - engage with the plays in detail while connecting them with some of the biggest questions we all ask ourselves, about love, friendship, ritual, language, human interactions and the world around us. The plays are examined through various social theories including performance theory, cognitive theory, semiotics, exchange theory and structuralism. The book concludes with a consideration of how "the new astronomy" of his day and developments in optics changed the very idea of "perspective," and shaped Shakespeare's approach to embedding social theory in his dramatic texts. This accessible and engaging book will appeal to those approaching Shakespeare from outside literary studies, but will also be valuable to literature students approaching Shakespeare for the first time, or looking for a new angle on the plays.

Shakespeare as a Way of Life shows how reading Shakespeare helps us to live with epistemological weakness and even to practice this weakness, to make it a way of life. In a series of close readings, Kuzner shows how Hamlet, Lucrece, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens, impel us to grapple with basic uncertainties: how we can be free, whether the world is abundant, whether we have met the demands of love and social life. To Kuzner, Shakespeare’s skepticism doesn’t have the enabling potential of Keats’s heroic “negativity capability,” but neither is that skepticism the corrosive disease that necessarily issues in tragedy. While sensitive to both possibilities, Kuzner offers a way to keep negative capability negative while making skepticism livable. Rather than light the way to empowered, liberal subjectivity, Shakespeare’s works demand lasting disorientation, demand that we practice the impractical so as to reshape the frames by which we view and negotiate the world. The act of reading Shakespeare cannot yield the practical value that cognitive scientists and literary critics attribute to it. His work neither clarifies our sense of ourselves, of others, or of the world; nor heartens us about the human capacity for insight and invention; nor sharpens our ability to appreciate and adjudicate complex problems of ethics and politics. Shakespeare’s plays, rather, yield cognitive discomforts, and it is just these discomforts that make them worthwhile.

In Shakespeare on Theatre, master acting teacher Robert Cohen brilliantly scrutinises Shakespeare's implicit theories of acting, paying close attention to the plays themselves and providing a wealth of fascinating historical evidence. What he finds will surprise scholars and actors alike – that Shakespeare's drama and his practice as an actor were founded on realism, though one clearly distinct from the realism later found in Stanislavski. Shakespeare on Acting is an extraordinary introduction to the way the plays articulate a profound understanding of performance and reflect the life and times of a uniquely talented theatre-maker.

There is no Shakespeare without text. Yet readers often do not realize that the words in the book they hold, like the dialogue they hear from the stage, has been revised, augmented and emended since Shakespeare's lifetime. An essential resource for the history of Shakespeare on the page, Shakespeare and Textual Theory traces the explanatory underpinnings of these changes through the centuries. After providing an introduction to early modern printing practices, Suzanne Gossett describes the original quartos and folios as well as the first collected editions. Subsequent sections summarize the work of the 'New Bibliographers' and the radical challenge to their technical analysis posed by poststructuralist theory, which undermined the presumed stability of author and text. Shakespeare and Textual Theory presents a balanced view of the current theoretical debates, which include the nature of the surviving texts we call Shakespeare's; the relationship of the author 'Shakespeare' and of authorial intentions to any of these texts; the extent and nature of Shakespeare's collaboration with others; and the best or most desirable way to present the texts - in editions or performances. The book is illustrated throughout with examples showing how theoretical decisions affect the text of Shakespeare's plays, and case studies of Hamlet and Pericles demonstrate how different theories complicate both text and meaning, whether a play survives in one version or several. The conclusion summarizes the many ways in which beliefs about Shakespeare's texts have changed over the centuries.

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.