Shakespearean Tragedy

Name: Shakespearean Tragedy
Brand: The Arden Shakespeare
Price: 99.5 EUR
Availability: BackOrder

Kiernan Ryan(Author)

The Arden Shakespeare (Publisher)

Published on 9. September 2021

Book

Hardback

312 pages

978-1-4725-8699-5 (ISBN)

€99.50incl. 7% vat

Shipment within 15-20 days

Description

This ground-breaking book reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision that drives Shakespeare's tragedies, tracing its unbroken development from its beginnings in the Henry VI plays and Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, right through to his last, Coriolanus. The four full-length studies at the heart of the book focus in depth on Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, but with the same unmistakably Shakespearean tragic vision at its core. Through compelling new readings of the plays, grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan shows how Shakespeare dramatizes the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits.

Reviews / Votes

Kiernan Ryan approaches Shakespearean tragedy like a visitor from the future, to reveal how these centuries-old plays still 'dream on things to come' through the politics of time. He shows how the lovers are crossed by stars dead for millennia; and why the light that breaks in their day is a dawn that hasn't yet arrived. But we are the future Hamlet awaits, in Ryan's time frame; Cordelia's 'smiles and tears' are our cues for 'a better way'. So, this is truly a world turned upside-down, where the hero counts the 'hours, days, years' before 'desolation begins to make a better life'. In short, Shakespearean Tragedy gives us a master-class in 'the revolution of the times'. * Richard Wilson, Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Kingston University, UK * Kiernan Ryan has done more than anyone else to bring to light what he calls, in this splendid and beautifully written book, the "mutinous utopian logic" of Shakespeare's drama-to show us that, as Shakespeare said, "Thought is free", able to peer beyond a cabined, cribbed, confined present to an emancipated, more human, future. Shakespearean Tragedy is not only a masterwork of subtle, scrupulous, attentive criticism, written in admirably straightforward prose, it is also a major contribution to a leftist politics characterized above all by universalism and solidarity. Here is Shakespeare criticism for the 99%! * Peter Holbrook, Professor of English Literature, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia * This brilliantly written and consistently illuminating book presents a wholly original perspective on every one of Shakespeare's tragedies, and makes a compelling case for their importance now. With a refreshing range of reference across the breadth of the critical tradition, not to mention the whole scope of theory and philosophy, it thrillingly opens our ears to Shakespeare as 'the prophetic soul of the wide world'. Thanks to Ryan, the most famous characters in literature come close and confess that they are haunted by their own fulfilled selves in the transfigured future to which Shakespeare is ushering us, even as they fall prey to their times. * Ewan Fernie, Chair and Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK * Ryan's chapters on Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and King Lear, incomparable in their coverage, depth and reasonableness, should become obligatory reading for anyone interested in those plays ... Shakespearean Tragedy is of incalculable value. * Sederi Yearbook *

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Content

Preface

PART I

1 The Birth of Shakespearean Tragedy: 2 & 3 Henry VI
The Quondam King
The Wild Morisco
The Upstart Crow
The Devil's Butcher
PART II

2 Titus Andronicus: A Sympathy of Woe
Prototypes and Precursors
A Wilderness of Tigers
This Fearful Slumber
3 Romeo and Juliet: Kissing by the Book
Strange Love Grown Bold
The Prison-House of Language
Empowering the Audience
4 Julius Caesar: The Common Good
An Icy Anatomy
Scorning the Base Degrees
The Foremost Man of All the World

PART III

5 Hamlet: A Kind of Fighting
The Stamp of One Defect
Seeing Doubles
That Within Which Passes Show
Things Rank and Gross in Nature
The Whips and Scorns of Time
The Strong Confluence of Contending Forces
A King of Infinite Space
The Prophetic Soul of the Wide World
6 Othello: Thereby Hangs a Tail
Expectation in Preference to Surprise
Sinking Below Shakespeare
True Colours
The Green-Eyed Monster
Who Hath Done This Deed?
The Tragedy of the Handkerchief
If Wives Do Fall
Motiveless Malignity and the Curse of Service
What You Know, You Know
A Pageant to Keep Us in False Gaze
7 King Lear: Shakespeare's Leviathan
A Play Fit for a King
Echoes and Anticipations (i)
Echoes and Anticipations (ii)
A Better Where to Find
The Whoreson and the Plague of Custom
The Fool and the King
The Art of Known and Feeling Sorrows
The King and the Beggar
So Distribution Should Undo Excess
A Whole Dead World Galloping Over the Living Earth
8 Macbeth: The Habit of Another Nature
Embracing the Butcher
Supernatural Soliciting
Terrestrial Tragedy
The Language of Complicity
Vaster Powers Without: Mirroring Macbeth
So Much More the Man
Dispossession and Disavowal
Pity, Like a Naked New-Born Babe
Blood Will Have Blood
Ere Humane Stature Purged the Gentle Weal
PART IV9 Antony and Cleopatra: Making Defect Perfection
Tragedy Travestied
The Nobleness of Life
Past the Size of Dreaming: Utopian Realism
A Lass Unparalleled

10 Coriolanus: A World Elsewhere
Antecedents and Affinities
An Inventory to Particularize Their Abundance
To Unbuild the City and to Lay All Flat
A Kind of Nothing

Works Cited

Index

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