Samuel Johnson's Shakespearean criticism

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory

Shakespeare\u27s plays were not always the inviolable texts they are almost universally considered to be today. The Restoration and eighteenth century committed what many critics view as one of the most subversive acts in literary history—the rewriting and restructuring of Shakespeare\u27s plays. Many of us are familiar with Nahum Tate\u27s audacious adaptation of King Lear with its resoundingly happy ending, but Tate was only one of a score of playwrights who adapted Shakespeare\u27s plays. Between 1660 and 1777, more than fifty adaptations appeared in print and on the stage, works in which playwrights augmented, substantially cut, or completely rewrote the original plays. The plays were staged with new characters, new scenes, new endings, and, underlying all this novelty, new words. Why did this happen? And why, in the later eighteenth century, did it stop? These questions have serious implications regarding both the aesthetics of the literary text and its treatment, for the adaptations manifest the period\u27s perceptions of Shakespeare. As such, they demonstrate an important evolution in the definition of poetic language, and in the idea of what constitutes a literary work. In The Re-Imagined Text, Jean I. Marsden examines both the adaptations and the network of literary theory that surrounds them, thereby exploring the problems of textual sanctity and of the author\u27s relationship to the text. As she demonstrates, Shakespeare\u27s works, and English literature in general, came to be defined by their words rather than by the plots and morality on which the older aesthetic theory focused—a clear step toward our modern concern for the word and its varying levels of signification. Jean I. Marsden is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. A scrupulous and well-argued study. . . . Marsden has written an important chapter in the history of the literary text itself. —Modern Philology A groundbreaking instance of what might be called a \u27post-critical\u27 or \u27post-ideological\u27 method. . . . Entertaining and information, this non-stop page turner is a gala opening-night event. —Besprechungenhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_dramatic_literature/1006/thumbnail.jp

Something in it for the underdog: the playwriting of Joan Ure

No abstract available

Othello (1604) revisited: Shakespeare’s characters and Elizabethan Foreign Policy

This article attempts to historicize Shakespeare’scharacterization in one of the most staged plays in the world, viz., Othello,The Moor of Venice (1603) The analysis is conducted along the lines of NabilMatar’s study of the role of Barbary in the making of Early Modern Britain inhis Britain and Barbary (2006)

English and French Criticism of the Tragedies of Shakespeare in the age of Voltaire.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Divine William and the master: The influence of Shakespeare on the novels of Henry James

Henry James\u27s most sustained commentary on Shakespeare comes in the form of an introduction to an edition of The Tempest that was published in 1907. In it, he remarks that the play is a reflection of Shakespeare consciously tasting of the first and rarest of his gifts, that of imaged creative Expression...to show him as unresistingly aware (1207). This praise ties unerringly back to James\u27s praise of the artist as one who views the world through open eyes and can capture the nuance of experience. James himself worked at the craft of fiction, and writes extensively in his notebooks and the New York Edition Prefaces of the origins of many of his stories and novels. That James admired Shakespeare is undeniable. James knew Shakespeare\u27s plays intimately, as a reader of the plays, a playgoer, and a reviewer. A close study of The Aspern Papers, The Birthplace, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The American reveals the influence of Shakespeare\u27s plays on the shaping of characters and thematic elements of plot found in James\u27s works