Literatura académica sobre el tema "Criticism, textualshakespeare, william , 1564-1616"

In this dissertation I develop and theorize an approach to Shakespearean character. I focus on the ways in which characters talk about knowing others and being known; in other words, this is an approach to characters who are themselves approaching characters. The plays I treat in detail are Coriolanus and Hamlet. The words characters in these plays use when they explain their decisions, avoid explaining their decisions, talk about others' decisions, or try to expose others' secrets, are often position-and-movement words. I argue that characters use for these purposes words related by wordplay to the postures and gestures involved in crucial rituals (the "custom of request" in Coriolanus, the fencing match in Hamlet). At the same time, this is a metacritical project: I deal with approaches and attitudes of Shakespeare interpreters. How do we stand in relation to each other? How do editors and critics echo and transform the characters' postural/gestural language, and what are the implications of these echoes and transformations? Why is it worthwhile to work toward awareness of these echoes and transformations? In an extensive introductory section I theorize the kind of reading practiced here as an ethical practice-a practice intended to modify what Michel Foucault calls the rapport a soi.<br>The project's main original contribution is its way of re-conceiving the relationships among several currents in Shakespeare studies. My discussion engages with recent work in textual studies. Examples include work by Leah Marcus and Paul Werstine. It also engages with historically informed treatments of wordplay. Examples include work by Margreta de Grazia and Patricia Parker. And it addresses work that could be said to be part of a move in the field toward "ethical criticism." Examples include work by Stanley Cavell and John Guillory. As well, my discussion engages with psychoanalytic criticism by Marjorie Garber, Coppelia Kahn, and others. While I do not consider myself a psychoanalytic critic, the affinity my approach has with psychoanalysis has to do with my interest in making explicit some of the implications of unreflectively chosen metaphors, word associations, etc. The implications that concern me most are those that have to do with the ways interpreters relate to each other.

The sacramental rhetoric and iconography of the Lancastrian Tetralogy significantly contribute to our recognition that the theological center of Shakespeare's historical drama is distinctively Anglican. Shakespeare (whether he personally was an Anglican churchman) invokes in the Lancaster plays the symbols and speech definitive of the Protestant Reformation in order to illustrate dramatically the Crown's convictions of the transcendent purpose of the English nation in human history, especially as that purpose had been defined by Tudor historiography. Shakespeare's histories demonstrate a conviction, broadly conceived and illustrated, of faith in the providential destiny of a nation whose very birth and sustenance in adversity form a sign of its election to grace and divine favor.Furthermore, Shakespeare's Lancaster plays, by continuing the didactic tradition of the medieval stage, embrace the precepts of Tudor monarchy and apply those principles of government and Reformation theology to the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare's histories therefore interpret history; they do not recollect it--except in the spirit of sixteenth-century imagination, harmonized with legend and myth. Consequently, the Lancaster cycle of histories constitutes a unified dramatic quartet in which history as fact is eschewed in favor of history as progressive revelatory sign, a vision enabled by mythography derived from the emblems and rhetoric of the sixteenth-century Anglican Christian tradition.<br>Department of English

Shakespeare's history plays are not merely benign representations of various historical figures and events but the site of political, cultural, and ideological contestation at the time of their performance. Richard II documents two divergent theoretical approaches to sovereignty which are more applicable to the political climate in Shakespeare's time than Richard's. In this essay, I read this play through the lens of various political tracts and historical tendencies dominant in late Elizabethan England. Though such an analysis might best be understood as historical materialist in orientation, I offer a contextual analysis of various modes of early modern political thought drawing variously upon theoretical precepts associated with new historicism as well as the 'ideas in context' school associated with Quentin Skinner, among others.<br>Such an analysis reveals a shift in the mode of theoretical discourse. Richard's divine-right/monarchical approach to sovereignty based in an overarching ecclesiastical power base gives way to Bolingbroke's pragmatic and consensus driven politics. This shift mirrors the movement in late 16$ rm sp{th}$ and early 17$ rm sp{th}$ century England from traditional religious arguments offered by Richard Hooker, John Whitgift, and residually by James I to a more secular political discourse inaugurated by Machiavelli and his English adherents and symptomatic of the reign of Elizabeth herself. Roughly speaking this modulation follows the pattern of paradigm shifts in the physical sciences exposed by Thomas Kuhn's influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The emergent theory, while marking a rapid and overwhelming reorientation of the terms and initial presuppositions of political discourse, draws in many crucial respects on the accrued tenets of the outgoing paradigm. The play therefore acts as a retroactive representation of a political reformation which occurred much later than the events depicted in the play.

The promotion of Shakespeare to the centre of the English literary canon was largely facilitated by ten major eighteenth-century editions of his plays: by Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1723-25), Lewis Theobald (1733), Thomas Hanmer (1744), William Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson (1765), George Steevens (1766), Edward Capell (1767-68), Johnson and Steevens (1773) and Edmond Malone (1790). The popularity of Newtonian science in eighteenth-century England helps to explain the mentality that impelled this energetic enterprise. In their Prefaces, the editors describe Shakespeare as a Newton-like genius who understood the underlying principles of human nature and expressed them through his characters. Shakespeare, however, unlike Newton, was not a systematic thinker, and the editors are critical of his language and of his tendency to cater to the low tastes of the Elizabethan theatre. They view him as a genius who understood fundamental truths about human nature and, at the same time, metaphorically, as nature itself---a site of heterogeneity and confusion where the editor must find hidden knowledge. They figure themselves as, scientists charged with the task of altering, restoring and annotating Shakespeare's writings. In the editions leading to and including that of Johnson, the editors' focus is on the universality of Shakespeare's discoveries. The early editors promote a transcendental image of Shakespeare as a timeless genius who rose above the relatively barbaric age in which he lived. The two editors following Johnson, however, place an increasing emphasis on Shakespeare's Englishness. While the idea of Shakespeare as a universal genius persists, Steevens and Capell also view him as a specifically English figure whose writings are to a large extent a product of his society. This nationalist emphasis goes hand in hand with an increasingly historical approach to the annotation and textual restoration of Shakespeare. The development of editing as a professional scientific vocation culminates with Malone, who augmented the editorial apparatus with thoroughly researched accounts of Shakespeare's life and theatre. The persistent emphasis on knowledge in the editors' work helps to account for the rise of Shakespeare's canonicity in relation to the Newtonian truth-seeking project of the eighteenth century.

Critics have long neglected Shakespearean comedy's examination of the household's role in the formulation of community values by reading its references to domestic life allegorically as commentary on the ostensibly more important public realms of marketplace and state. This dissertation argues that representations of the household in the comedies are best understood as theatrical explorations of ethical inquiry as it pertains to everyday lived experience. Using contemporary sermons, political tracts, and conduct books to situate Shakespeare's plays within a larger cultural movement that was coming to understand the household as a foundation of the moral economy of early modern England, this study provides readings of The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest that emphasize each play's investigation of the household as a potential locus of the good life. The characters in these plays develop an awareness of themselves as members of broader communities by negotiating the particular details of household existence---by sharing meals, exchanging gifts, and falling in love. This awareness is in turn presented as a necessary component of personal happiness and a fundamental constituent of a just and merciful state. By developing an account of household life in the plays, this dissertation argues that recognizing the importance of affective domestic relations to constructions of the self as socially embedded moral agent is crucial to understanding the comedies' nuanced analysis of gender, class, and race relations.

This dissertation provides a critical, systematic survey of economics in literary theory and practice. Since Aristotle, economic categories have been used as interpretive grounds on which to conceptualize the literary text and distinguish it as a moral or normative sphere. Because economic categories presuppose different norms of individual and social action, the use of a specific category as an interpretive ground generates a particular outlook or moral perspective.<br>In the first part of the discussion, we critique theories in which the literary text is conceptualized as an economy. After distinguishing three distinct models of the "textual economy," we evaluate them in terms of their logical consistency and normative presuppositions. Selecting the model that is the most logically consistent and normatively valuable, we study two early modern works to see if this model operates as an intentional device implicated in a work's form and content. The works chosen are William Shakespeare's Sonnets and William Bradford's history "Of Plimoth Plantation," both of which display a facination with economic discourse.<br>The second part of the discussion takes up the question of economics in the theory and practice of putting texts in context. We distinguish four different models of contextualization that depend on economic categories. Explicitly or implicitly, contemporary research agendas and critical positions depend on these categories to situate a literary text in a specific setting. An economic category like exchange, for example, is frequently privileged as a common ground, a shared quality or characteristic used to integrate a text with a context. After critiquing models of contextualization, we synthesize the best they have to offer into a new framework. We then use this framework to situate the texts by Shakespeare and Bradford into the historical settings of their production and reception. The result is a picture of the text in context that is vital, a moving picture, quite unlike the customary still life of artifact and background.

Since F.S. Boas coined the term in 1896, All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure For Measure have been generally accepted as "problem plays," and many critics have offered biographical, thematic, and formal explanations of why these plays are so "dark." In this thesis, I accept that these plays are "problems" and I propose a rhetorical explanation for dissatisfaction with them, especially with their endings. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's philosophy of literary form and his anthropology of man as the symbol-using animal, I show that in these plays Shakespeare frustrates the expectations of an audience for a definite ending through death or marriage which would define the "terms" characterized in each play; secondly, he provides no scapegoat whose victimage would allow the audience to recognize an order clearly proposed for its acceptance; finally, he supplies no symbol of order which credibly demonstrates its power to establish a renewed society. As rhetoric, these plays show an intense "dancing of attitudes" toward symbols of order and toward conventional forms which would provide a clear sense of an ending. As such, they show what Burke calls "self-interference" on the part of the playwright — a deliberate balancing of arguments for the sake of "quizzicality" toward language as symbolic action. According to this analysis, the problem plays remain problems for an audience which seeks identification with symbols of order; they are, however, a tribute to the agile mind of a master rhetorician.<br>Arts, Faculty of<br>English, Department of<br>Graduate