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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Shakespeare's Romance Of Knowing, Maurice Hunt
Shakespeare's Romance Of Knowing, Maurice Hunt
Quidditas
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
What The Gardener Knew: Pruning And Power In The Troublesome Raigne Of King John And Richard Ii, Dorothea Kehler
Quidditas
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 …