History Commons^™

Shakespeare's Romance Of Knowing, Maurice Hunt

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From time to time literary critics have claimed that Shakespeare's undisputed last plays—Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest—are, to varying degrees, concerned with the main characters' learning experiences. These claim range, for example, from Stephen Orgel's aargument that adversity schools Alonso and Prospero in humility to Northrop Frye's assertion that education provides the means for the protagonists of the last plays to recover some sort of paradise. In other words, critics over the years have claimed in different ways that the last plays are either educational or epistemological romances. And yet no one, to my …

What The Gardener Knew: Pruning And Power In The Troublesome Raigne Of King John And Richard Ii, Dorothea Kehler

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Lack of knowledge is a chief concern of Richard II. Throughout, whaat the audience knows is provocatively matched or exceeded by what it does not know. Information seemingly deferred remains undisclosed in a discourse of permanent deferral. Bolingbroke's purpose in accusing Mowbray, the duration and extent of Bolingbroke's ambition, Richard's reasons for exiling Mobray, Richard's feelings towards him, Richard's sexual predilections, the truth or falsity of Bagot's accusation of Aumerle, York's reasons for demanding Aumerle's death–such questions as these the play refuses to answer. In consequence, from the onset, personal and political motives in Richard II are murky; the …

Gulled Into An "I"-Word, Or Much Ado About A Pronoun, D'Orsay W. Pearson

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Despite the warning of the editors of the 1975 New Arden Twelfth Night the M.O.A.I. sequence of Maria's riddle for Malvolio is "a sequence of letters expressly designed to make Malvolio interpret them as he does, thus prolonging the comic scene," and that "attempts to wring further meaning from them are misplaced" (Lothiam and Craik 68), there is a strong probability that the letters, rather than being a meaningless sequence, were intended by Shakespeare as a fairly simple orthographic joke—one which expands Malvolio's characterization as a socially ambitious closet sybarite, deficient in a social accomplishment expected of those who would …

The Syllables Of Time: An Augustinian Context For Macbeth 5.5, John S. Tanner

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Among the most familiar lines in all Shakespeare are these Macbeth utters upon hearing the Lady Macbeth's death:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(5.5.19-28)

So familiar, indeed, is this speech …

The Seven Ages Of Pericles, Cynthia Marshall

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Pericles, swept along by the wave of interest in Shakespeare's romances, has lately received its due share of critical and theatrical attention, but it remains something of a bastard child. Pericles was originally labelled a "problem" because oof the textual controversy—exclusion from the 1623 folio, evidence of joint authorship—and the label sticks because of the common complaint that the play somehow feels different from the other plays in the canon. Uneven in style and random in structure, it seems almost to provoke disengagement. It actively resists expectations of casual plot and frustrates the urge to identify with characters on …

Review Essay: Eric Sams, Ed, Shakespeare's Lost Play "Edmund Ironside", Charles L. Squier

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Eric Sams, ed., Shakespeare's Lost Play "Edmund Ironside," St. Martin's Press, 1985.

Review Essay: David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances And The Royal Family, Dorothy C. Jones

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David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family, University of Kansas Press, 1985. $25.00

The Sense Of An Ending In Shakespeare's Early Comedies, Deborah T. Curren Aquino

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About Shakespeare's endings, Samuel Johnson wrote:

in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labor to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented. (71-72)

In the twentieth century, Ernest Schanzer has echoed Dr. Johnson's opinion in his commentary on A Midsummer Night's Dream: "For sheer economy and multiplicity of effect it [the first scene] has no equal in any of …

"Use And Abuse" In Romeo And Juliet, Maurice Hunt

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Near the midpoint of Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence formulates an authoritative-sounding concept which seemingly lends itself to interpreting tragedy. Gathering "baleful weeds" and "precious juiced flowers," the Friar states that everything earthly has a virtuous use and a potential abuse:

O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies

In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.

For naught so vile that on the earth doth live

But too the earth some special good doth give;

Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use,

Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.

Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied, …

Shakespeare's And Plutarch's Brutus: Shakespeare's Dramatic Strategy To Undercut The Noble Image, Shirley Rish

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Modern critics of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar frequently challenge the view that Brutus was in fact "the noblest Roman of them all,' but only rarely do they completely repudiate Brutus' characterization as a patriotic idealist. They are of course aware of ironic and ambiguous elements in the tragedy, but they fail to take the step that would seem obvious: to note how Shakespeare undercut Brutus' noble image by carefully manipulating materials from the principal source for the play, Sir Thomas North's English translation of Plutarch's Lives.

Catharsis In Aristotle, The Renaissance, And Elsewhere, Thomas Clayton

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In an essay on "Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama," Stephen Orgel presents an appealing and sympathetic view of Renaissance dramatic-generic theory and practice as original, capacious, and flexible, concluding that, "like Scaliger, Shakespeare thought of genres not as sets of rules but as sets of expectations and possibilities." In relation to this finding, we should perhaps be content to be "unclear about tragic catharsis," because "at least we know it is there, convincing us that tragedy works—even if we do not know how or on whom" (p.120). As the Renaissance read Aristotle, "tragedy achieved its end by purging …