The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy is a collection of fifty-four essays by a range of s... more The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy is a collection of fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world, bringing together some of the best-known writers in the field with a strong selection of younger Shakespeareans. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The collection is organized in five sections. The opening section places the plays in a variety of illuminating contexts, exploring questions of genre, and examining ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of ‘Shakespearean’ tragedy. The second section is devoted to current textual issues; while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, ...
Contents: Part I Special Section: 'European Shakespeares', Edited by Ton Hoenselaars and ... more Contents: Part I Special Section: 'European Shakespeares', Edited by Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo: Introduction: European Shakespeare - quo vadis?, Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo The chore and the passion: Shakespeare and graduation in mid-20th century Portugal, Rui Carvalho Homem Henry V and the Anglo-Greek alliance in World War II, Tina Krontiris Asian Shakespeares in Europe: from the unfamiliar to the defamiliarised, Alexander C.Y. Huang Rearticulating a culture of links: Peter Brook's European Shakespeare, Fran Rayner Shakespeare uprooted: the BBC and ShakespeareRe-Told (2005), Clara Calvo and Ton Hoenselaars The anti-Americanism of EU Shakespeare, Douglas Bruster Shakespeare and France in the European mirror, Jean-Christophe Mayer. Part II Shapes of Character: Man's chief good: the Shakespearean character as evaluator, Mustapha Fahmi 'I have no other but a woman's reason': folly, femininity and sexuality in Renaissance discourses and Shakespeare's plays, Paromita Chakravarti. Part III Shapes of Romance: Shipwreck and ecology: towards a structural theory of Shakespeare and romance, Steve Mentz Great miracle or lying wonder: Janus-faced romance in Pericles, Tiffany J. Werth 'Better days': cultural memory in As You Like It, Indira Ghose. Part IV Review Essays: (Re)presenting Shakespeare's co-authors: lessons from the Oxford Shakespeare, Tom Rooney Inventing the human: brontosaurus Bloom and 'the Shakespeare in us', Laurence Wright Bibliography Index.
Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays, 2002
In the previous chapter I traced the ways in which a name may act as more than a mere designator ... more In the previous chapter I traced the ways in which a name may act as more than a mere designator in the worlds of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. From its action as a focal point of ineradicable social relations and ties in Romeo and Juliet and the sonnets, through its idealising and de-idealising use in Troilus and Cressida and the dark-woman poems, to its transformative power in the naming and re-naming events of Othello , I have argued that the proper name may be as much part of the performative dimensions of language use as more syntactically elaborate utterances. In this chapter I pursue the question of names as one thread within the broader text of All's Well that Ends Well and its much noted relationship to Shakespeare's sonnets. Helen's predicament represents the limits of what names can do. Being merely ‘the name and not the thing’ ( All's Well , 5.3.310), she has to seek performative modes of action beyond language that can transform her from ‘name’ to ‘thing’. The framing analysis for the role of names in All's Well includes an extended re-examination of the much noted affinities between the play and the sonnets, the politics of gender and class in the play and the poems, and the subject positions and embodied situations of address of the sonnets that are represented within in the play.
For more than 500 years, the law of master and servant fixed the boundaries of “free labor” in Br... more For more than 500 years, the law of master and servant fixed the boundaries of “free labor” in Britain and throughout the British Empire. Compounded of statutory enactments, judicial doctrines, and social practice, it defined and controlled employment relations for almost a quarter of the world's population in more than 100 colonial and postcolonial jurisdictions. The “law of master and servant” to which Douglas Hay and Paul Craven refer was enacted a year before Shakespeare's birth. The Statute of Artificers of 1562/3 consolidated and replaced all previous forms of legislation in England that had sought to regulate labour relations by fixing maximum wages, determining the conditions of employment as essentially a set of reciprocal, if unequal, relations between masters and servants, and laying down forms of legal censure and punishment for those who broke contracts or transgressed the bonds of the Statute. From the perspective of modern assumptions regarding freedom of contract, Hay and Craven's qualification of the phrase “free labor” with scare quotes is apposite. The servants covered by the Statute of Artificers were no slaves or bondsmen. However, nor could their choice regarding the place, time, and conditions of employment or, in many cases, the person of their masters, be regarded as entirely or even largely unconstrained: “Freedom to choose one's employer did not imply freedom to remain unemployed: if the master and servant acts did not themselves compel engagement and the whip of hunger did not suffice, then … the law about vagrancy took up the burden” (33).
Introduction, 1. â Moralize two meaningsâ in one play: contrariety on the Tudor stage, 2. Perfo... more Introduction, 1. â Moralize two meaningsâ in one play: contrariety on the Tudor stage, 2. Performance, game, and representation in Richard III, 3. Mingling vice and â worthinessâ in King John, 4. Clowning: agencies between voice and pen, 5. Clowning at the frontiers ...
A travers les discussions de l’amitie avec leur point culminant dans les Essais de Montaigne, les... more A travers les discussions de l’amitie avec leur point culminant dans les Essais de Montaigne, les philosophes aussi bien que les poetes font recours a la metaphore de la flamme, et travaillent la distinction entre sa duree et son intensite pour reclamer la superiorite celle-la, philia, a celle-ci, eros. Au cours de Twelfth Night, la discussion traditionelle trouve une place d’honneur : Orsino nie la possibilite meme de l’amitie chez la femme. Sans jamais juger, Shakespeare montre la force et la coherence de l’amitie de Viola, travesitie, dans son amour pour son maitre. Sous cette optique, l’article utilise Twelfth Night pour remettre en cause non seulement ces idees recues entre les amis de la piece, mais aussi entre Montaigne et Marie de Goumay.
Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. By Tzachi Zamir (Princeton, NJ: Princeto... more Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. By Tzachi Zamir (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), xv + 234 pp. $35.00/£22.95 cloth. There has been a sudden interest in the...
This essay challenges the way in which Richard II has been perceived and portrayed in recent film... more This essay challenges the way in which Richard II has been perceived and portrayed in recent films and theatrical adaptations and in literary criticism since Coleridge. It bases its research on experimental productions by Anərkē Shakespeare, using original practice techniques without a director, relying solely on the text rather than external conceptual impositions. Scrutinising Richard’s language as both an embodiment of performance, and embodied in performance, obviates received caricatures of Richard as weak, effeminate, gay, and capricious. It uses J.L. Austin’s analysis of perlocutionary and illocutionary performatives to show the degree to which Richard’s illocutionary fragility, as he loses political power at a local level, develops a perlocutionary strength in which he demonstrates unexpected performative capacities. It argues that political power and theatrical power in the play are inversely proportional to each other. Consequently, as Richard gains theatrical power he ach...
David Schalkwyk talks about his latest book on Shakespeare, Love and Language(Cambridge Universit... more David Schalkwyk talks about his latest book on Shakespeare, Love and Language(Cambridge University Press, 2018) with Silvia Bigliazzi. Keywords: Shakespeare; love; language; desire; eros
This essay approaches the question of language in Macbeth from the perspective of the recent prol... more This essay approaches the question of language in Macbeth from the perspective of the recent proliferation of interest in computational analysis. Using the programmes Docuscope, LATtice, and Wordhoard, it examines the LATtice indication that, based on Language Action Types (LATs), Macbeth is, after Troilus and Cressida , linguistically closest to Hamlet and the Wordhoard finding that in Macbeth the pronoun she is used less often than in Shakespeare’s canon. It argues that, despite the apparent similarity of language in the two tragedies, there is a profound difference between the two when one takes into account the poetic qualities of metaphor, rhythm, and the variation of single and multiple-syllabic words. Finally, examining the relative occurrence of the noun “woman” in the play, it argues that, in linguistic terms, the preponderance of uses in the final act in the phrase “of woman born” creates a rhythmical mantra that suggests that the root of evil in the Scottish play lies in ...
L'A. examine la conception du langage selon Saussure, en analysant les critiques post-saussur... more L'A. examine la conception du langage selon Saussure, en analysant les critiques post-saussuriennes de Tallis et de Wittgenstein
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy is a collection of fifty-four essays by a range of s... more The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy is a collection of fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world, bringing together some of the best-known writers in the field with a strong selection of younger Shakespeareans. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The collection is organized in five sections. The opening section places the plays in a variety of illuminating contexts, exploring questions of genre, and examining ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of ‘Shakespearean’ tragedy. The second section is devoted to current textual issues; while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, ...
Contents: Part I Special Section: 'European Shakespeares', Edited by Ton Hoenselaars and ... more Contents: Part I Special Section: 'European Shakespeares', Edited by Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo: Introduction: European Shakespeare - quo vadis?, Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo The chore and the passion: Shakespeare and graduation in mid-20th century Portugal, Rui Carvalho Homem Henry V and the Anglo-Greek alliance in World War II, Tina Krontiris Asian Shakespeares in Europe: from the unfamiliar to the defamiliarised, Alexander C.Y. Huang Rearticulating a culture of links: Peter Brook's European Shakespeare, Fran Rayner Shakespeare uprooted: the BBC and ShakespeareRe-Told (2005), Clara Calvo and Ton Hoenselaars The anti-Americanism of EU Shakespeare, Douglas Bruster Shakespeare and France in the European mirror, Jean-Christophe Mayer. Part II Shapes of Character: Man's chief good: the Shakespearean character as evaluator, Mustapha Fahmi 'I have no other but a woman's reason': folly, femininity and sexuality in Renaissance discourses and Shakespeare's plays, Paromita Chakravarti. Part III Shapes of Romance: Shipwreck and ecology: towards a structural theory of Shakespeare and romance, Steve Mentz Great miracle or lying wonder: Janus-faced romance in Pericles, Tiffany J. Werth 'Better days': cultural memory in As You Like It, Indira Ghose. Part IV Review Essays: (Re)presenting Shakespeare's co-authors: lessons from the Oxford Shakespeare, Tom Rooney Inventing the human: brontosaurus Bloom and 'the Shakespeare in us', Laurence Wright Bibliography Index.
Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays, 2002
In the previous chapter I traced the ways in which a name may act as more than a mere designator ... more In the previous chapter I traced the ways in which a name may act as more than a mere designator in the worlds of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. From its action as a focal point of ineradicable social relations and ties in Romeo and Juliet and the sonnets, through its idealising and de-idealising use in Troilus and Cressida and the dark-woman poems, to its transformative power in the naming and re-naming events of Othello , I have argued that the proper name may be as much part of the performative dimensions of language use as more syntactically elaborate utterances. In this chapter I pursue the question of names as one thread within the broader text of All's Well that Ends Well and its much noted relationship to Shakespeare's sonnets. Helen's predicament represents the limits of what names can do. Being merely ‘the name and not the thing’ ( All's Well , 5.3.310), she has to seek performative modes of action beyond language that can transform her from ‘name’ to ‘thing’. The framing analysis for the role of names in All's Well includes an extended re-examination of the much noted affinities between the play and the sonnets, the politics of gender and class in the play and the poems, and the subject positions and embodied situations of address of the sonnets that are represented within in the play.
For more than 500 years, the law of master and servant fixed the boundaries of “free labor” in Br... more For more than 500 years, the law of master and servant fixed the boundaries of “free labor” in Britain and throughout the British Empire. Compounded of statutory enactments, judicial doctrines, and social practice, it defined and controlled employment relations for almost a quarter of the world's population in more than 100 colonial and postcolonial jurisdictions. The “law of master and servant” to which Douglas Hay and Paul Craven refer was enacted a year before Shakespeare's birth. The Statute of Artificers of 1562/3 consolidated and replaced all previous forms of legislation in England that had sought to regulate labour relations by fixing maximum wages, determining the conditions of employment as essentially a set of reciprocal, if unequal, relations between masters and servants, and laying down forms of legal censure and punishment for those who broke contracts or transgressed the bonds of the Statute. From the perspective of modern assumptions regarding freedom of contract, Hay and Craven's qualification of the phrase “free labor” with scare quotes is apposite. The servants covered by the Statute of Artificers were no slaves or bondsmen. However, nor could their choice regarding the place, time, and conditions of employment or, in many cases, the person of their masters, be regarded as entirely or even largely unconstrained: “Freedom to choose one's employer did not imply freedom to remain unemployed: if the master and servant acts did not themselves compel engagement and the whip of hunger did not suffice, then … the law about vagrancy took up the burden” (33).
Introduction, 1. â Moralize two meaningsâ in one play: contrariety on the Tudor stage, 2. Perfo... more Introduction, 1. â Moralize two meaningsâ in one play: contrariety on the Tudor stage, 2. Performance, game, and representation in Richard III, 3. Mingling vice and â worthinessâ in King John, 4. Clowning: agencies between voice and pen, 5. Clowning at the frontiers ...
A travers les discussions de l’amitie avec leur point culminant dans les Essais de Montaigne, les... more A travers les discussions de l’amitie avec leur point culminant dans les Essais de Montaigne, les philosophes aussi bien que les poetes font recours a la metaphore de la flamme, et travaillent la distinction entre sa duree et son intensite pour reclamer la superiorite celle-la, philia, a celle-ci, eros. Au cours de Twelfth Night, la discussion traditionelle trouve une place d’honneur : Orsino nie la possibilite meme de l’amitie chez la femme. Sans jamais juger, Shakespeare montre la force et la coherence de l’amitie de Viola, travesitie, dans son amour pour son maitre. Sous cette optique, l’article utilise Twelfth Night pour remettre en cause non seulement ces idees recues entre les amis de la piece, mais aussi entre Montaigne et Marie de Goumay.
Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. By Tzachi Zamir (Princeton, NJ: Princeto... more Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. By Tzachi Zamir (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), xv + 234 pp. $35.00/£22.95 cloth. There has been a sudden interest in the...
This essay challenges the way in which Richard II has been perceived and portrayed in recent film... more This essay challenges the way in which Richard II has been perceived and portrayed in recent films and theatrical adaptations and in literary criticism since Coleridge. It bases its research on experimental productions by Anərkē Shakespeare, using original practice techniques without a director, relying solely on the text rather than external conceptual impositions. Scrutinising Richard’s language as both an embodiment of performance, and embodied in performance, obviates received caricatures of Richard as weak, effeminate, gay, and capricious. It uses J.L. Austin’s analysis of perlocutionary and illocutionary performatives to show the degree to which Richard’s illocutionary fragility, as he loses political power at a local level, develops a perlocutionary strength in which he demonstrates unexpected performative capacities. It argues that political power and theatrical power in the play are inversely proportional to each other. Consequently, as Richard gains theatrical power he ach...
David Schalkwyk talks about his latest book on Shakespeare, Love and Language(Cambridge Universit... more David Schalkwyk talks about his latest book on Shakespeare, Love and Language(Cambridge University Press, 2018) with Silvia Bigliazzi. Keywords: Shakespeare; love; language; desire; eros
This essay approaches the question of language in Macbeth from the perspective of the recent prol... more This essay approaches the question of language in Macbeth from the perspective of the recent proliferation of interest in computational analysis. Using the programmes Docuscope, LATtice, and Wordhoard, it examines the LATtice indication that, based on Language Action Types (LATs), Macbeth is, after Troilus and Cressida , linguistically closest to Hamlet and the Wordhoard finding that in Macbeth the pronoun she is used less often than in Shakespeare’s canon. It argues that, despite the apparent similarity of language in the two tragedies, there is a profound difference between the two when one takes into account the poetic qualities of metaphor, rhythm, and the variation of single and multiple-syllabic words. Finally, examining the relative occurrence of the noun “woman” in the play, it argues that, in linguistic terms, the preponderance of uses in the final act in the phrase “of woman born” creates a rhythmical mantra that suggests that the root of evil in the Scottish play lies in ...
L'A. examine la conception du langage selon Saussure, en analysant les critiques post-saussur... more L'A. examine la conception du langage selon Saussure, en analysant les critiques post-saussuriennes de Tallis et de Wittgenstein
This paper discusses Shakespeare as a global phenomenon via the ethics of appropriation, arguing,... more This paper discusses Shakespeare as a global phenomenon via the ethics of appropriation, arguing, through M.M.Bakhtin, that he is a universally available language that resonates with all the voices that have and will inhabit it.
This essay investigates the nature of Shakespeare as a global phenomenon via the problem of the e... more This essay investigates the nature of Shakespeare as a global phenomenon via the problem of the ethics of appropriation, arguing finally, via M.M. Bakhtin, that Shakespeare should be regarded as a universally available language, resonant with all the voices that have spoken it.
LITERATURE AND THE TOUCH OF THE REAL: LITERATURE AND THE TOUCH OF THE REAL SAUSSURE, DERRIDA, WITTGENSTEIN—WEIMANN, GREENBLATT AND SHAKESPEARE, 2004
Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that Saussurean linguistic theory that has become the... more Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that Saussurean linguistic theory that has become the dominant view of language cannot sustain any kind of non-structuralist analysis of literature. Criticism has moved increasingly towards history and politics, but it has neither forged nor adopted a philosophy of language suited to its new purposes. There is, therefore, pressing to bring to bear on literary and cultural studies a philosophy of language that will enable “literary criticism to make contact with the real,” in Stephen Greenblatt’s recent words, by showing how language grasps material reality through a process of practical consciousness and social activity. The book offers a detailed account of the constitutive contradictions of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics that have been ignored by literary theorists. It argues that Derrida and Wittgenstein offer differently conceived, but related, ways of avoiding both the neo-Saussurean view that language either is disconnected from the world or constitutes reality, on the one hand, and the neo-Realist view that literature and fiction are secondary, etiolated forms of language use, one the other It demonstrates through a close reading of Derrida’s early texts that the notorious statement “there is nothing beyond the text” does not claim that there is nothing outside language. Rather, the broader context of this claim shows that that the reduction of the world from language is in fact one of Derrida’s earliest philosophical targets. The book uses the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to offer a renewed vision of the defamiliarizing power of literature. Literature, it argues, offers the kinds of “grammatical investigation” with which Wittgenstein himself was concerned. It is grammar (in the specialist sense in which he uses the term) that tells us “what kind of object anything is,” and the literary is the place where the coming together of language and the world is registered most fully. The book concludes with a discussion of Robert Weimann and Stephen Greenblatt’s work on William Shakespeare. Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that there is no gap between words and the world, and that because the world is always in language as part of its rules of representation, literature best reveals what kind of object anything is.
LITERATURE AND THE TOUCH OF THE REAL SAUSSURE, DERRIDA, WITTGENSTEIN—WEIMANN, GREENBLATT AND SHAKESPEARE, 2002
Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that Saussurean linguistic theory that has become the... more Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that Saussurean linguistic theory that has become the dominant view of language cannot sustain any kind of non-structuralist analysis of literature. Criticism has moved increasingly towards history and politics, but it has neither forged nor adopted a philosophy of language suited to its new purposes. There is, therefore, pressing to bring to bear on literary and cultural studies a philosophy of language that will enable “literary criticism to make contact with the real,” in Stephen Greenblatt’s recent words, by showing how language grasps material reality through a process of practical consciousness and social activity. The book offers a detailed account of the constitutive contradictions of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics that have been ignored by literary theorists. It argues that Derrida and Wittgenstein offer differently conceived, but related, ways of avoiding both the neo-Saussurean view that language either is disconnected from the world or constitutes reality, on the one hand, and the neo-Realist view that literature and fiction are secondary, etiolated forms of language use, one the other It demonstrates through a close reading of Derrida’s early texts that the notorious statement “there is nothing beyond the text” does not claim that there is nothing outside language. Rather, the broader context of this claim shows that that the reduction of the world from language is in fact one of Derrida’s earliest philosophical targets. The book uses the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to offer a renewed vision of the defamiliarizing power of literature. Literature, it argues, offers the kinds of “grammatical investigation” with which Wittgenstein himself was concerned. It is grammar (in the specialist sense in which he uses the term) that tells us “what kind of object anything is,” and the literary is the place where the coming together of language and the world is registered most fully. The book concludes with a discussion of Robert Weimann and Stephen Greenblatt’s work on William Shakespeare. Literature and the Touch of the Real argues that there is no gap between words and the world, and that because the world is always in language as part of its rules of representation, literature best reveals what kind of object anything is.
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