Suchergebnisse

Students read Shakespeare's plays to learn about politics and office, love and friendship, and other great themes of human life. This education is the core of the 'Shakespeare myth,' which is that Shakespeare educates the complete human being-man, woman, and citizen. In this paper, I provide support for the truth of this myth by challenging the suggestion that the Shakespeare of the 1590s is a traditional theist who accepts the divine machinery of providential history, a secularizing Machiavel, or a protorepublican advocating living together as equals under the rule of law. Instead of these Shakespearian simplifications, I present Shakespeare as a philosophical liberal who is interested in legitimacy, stability, participation, security, and the place of the individual within society, but not in a way that requires the complete enlightenment of his age's political forms and religious life, or that denies enlightenment altogether. Adapted from the source document.

Elizabeth Frazer presents an examination of Shakespeare's thoughts and views on politics as expressed through many of his major plays, particularly the tragedies.

Although writers of the English Restoration tragedy were not able to continue the path of the magnificent Renaissance tragedy and to become the worthy heirs of Shakespeare, they were experimenting with the verse and themes leaving a few impressive tragic scenes. Therefore, the heroic tragedy, as a dramatic kind, did not achieve an enviable aesthetic value. On the other hand, writers of comedies have managed to adjust the traditional elements to the new literary trends and to the atmosphere of the epoch. They have created a comedy of character and humor with an appropriate and realistic prose dialogue full of wit and refined language which was the best media for depicting cheerful and immoral aristocratic life of that time. Preserving and highlighting these dramatic elements, the dramatists of the Restoration have influenced the successors of a typical British comedy that will come to life again, in its true and pure comic form, in the works of Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

This paper presents an overview of my dissertation project. My project harnesses posthumanist and ecofeminist insights to illuminate how the category of the human—whether its metaphysical status, purview, or validity—is at the center of early modern understandings of classical moral and political philosophies. In doing so, my study redresses a gap in the critical reception of Shakespeare's Roman texts by challenging existing cross-historical, cross-cultural studies that (a) consider the human a stable construct and (b) overlook the capacity for nonhuman forces to impact humanity's discursive and material practices. I extend ongoing critical debates by demonstrating how the figure of Aristotle's "political animal" exceeds the human in Shakespeare's Roman plays (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline) and narrative poetry (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece). Specifically, I argue that early modern literary representations of human agency in ancient Mediterranean sea- and land-scapes are positioned alongside, and often considered less favorably than, the forces exerted by other creatures, inert matter, or technologies.