Shakespeare An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000

by McDonald, Russ

• ISBN13: 9780631234876
• ISBN10: 063123487X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-30
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Shakespeare: Criticism and Theory is an anthology of the most significant essays and book chapters published on Shakespeare in the second half of the twentieth century. An anthology of about 50 of the most significant essays and book chapters published on Shakespeare in the second half of the twentieth century. Introduces students to the variety of theoretical positions, thematic claims, methodologies, and modes of argument in Shakespeare criticism over the last 50 years. Critical views represented range from the old style historicism of E.M.W. Tillyard and the new criticism of William Empson to the new historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and the feminist perspective of Catherine Belsey. Pieces are organised into categories of critical thought and introduced in clear language. Most pieces are reproduced in their entirety.

Author Biography

Russ McDonald is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has written extensively on Shakespeare and early modern literature and culture, most recently in Shakespeare and the Art of Language (2001) and The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (Second Edition, 2001).

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Authorship	p. 1
Looney and the Oxfordians	p. 4
New Criticism	p. 15
The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness	p. 19
"Honest" in Othello	p. 35
"Introductory" Chapter About the Tragedies	p. 50
The "New Criticism" and King Lear	p. 63
Dramatic Kinds	p. 89
The Argument of Comedy	p. 93
Ambivalence: The Dialectic of the Histories	p. 100
The Saturnalian Pattern	p. 116
The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies	p. 125
The 1950s and 1960s: Theme, Character, Structure	p. 149
Reflections on the Sentimentalist's Othello	p. 152
Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet	p. 164
King Lear or Endgame	p. 174
The Cheapening of the Stage	p. 191
How Not to Murder Caesar	p. 209
Reader-Response Criticism	p. 221
On the Value of Hamlet	p. 225
Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V	p. 245
Textual Criticism and Bibliography	p. 265
The New Textual Criticism of Shakespeare	p. 269
Revising Shakespeare	p. 280
Narrative About Printed Shakespeare Texts: "Foul Papers" and "Bad Quartos"	p. 296
Psychoanalytic Criticism	p. 319
"Anger's my meat": Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus	p. 323
The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear	p. 338
To Entrap the Wisest: Sacrificial Ambivalence in The Merchant of Venice and Richard III	p. 353
What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psychoanalysis	p. 365
The Turn of the Shrew	p. 399
Historicism and New Historicism	p. 417
The Cosmic Background	p. 422
Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V	p. 435
The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies	p. 458
"Shaping Fantasies": Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture	p. 481
Materialist Criticism	p. 511
Shakespeare's Theater: Tradition and Experiment	p. 515
King Lear (ca. 1605-1606) and Essentialist Humanism	p. 535
Give an Account of Shakespeare and Education, Showing Why You Think They Are Effective and What You Have Appreciated About Them. Support Your Comments with Precise References	p. 547
Feminist Criticism	p. 565
Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism	p. 570
"I wooed thee with my sword": Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms	p. 591
The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or The Politics of Politics	p. 606
Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies	p. 633
Studies in Gender and Sexuality	p. 651
"This that you call love": Sexual and Social Tragedy in Othello	p. 655
The Performance of Desire	p. 669
The Secret Sharer	p. 684
The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy	p. 704
Performance Criticism	p. 727
Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre	p. 732
The Critical Revolution	p. 745
William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: Everything's Nice in America?	p. 750
Deeper Meanings and Theatrical Technique: The Rhetoric of Performance Criticism	p. 762
Postcolonial Shakespeare	p. 777
Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest	p. 781
Sexuality and Racial Difference	p. 794
Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest	p. 817
Reading Closely	p. 845
Shakespeare's Prose	p. 848
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.