Shakespeare Books

In this book, Coriolanus, Dr. George has collected criticisms of Shakespeare's play of that title from 1687 to 1940. A theme of this volume is that as generations have passed the interpretation of the play has changed. The author introduces each criticism with comments of his own, which help to clarify the sometimes-arcane language of past authors.

This book has many uses other than the study of Coriolanus. First, it demonstrates to the reader that great literature is viewed differently in different times. That in fact the meaning of a literary piece may be brought to it rather than from it. This application would be useful in the study of psychology as well as literature.

Next, this text can be used for instruction in the proper use of primary texts. There is no teacher greater than a superior example. The research done by Dr. George is excellent and his comments and classifications of each commentary are insightful.

Finally, reading this book allows the student to better understand the philosophical differences throughout the three hundred fifty years that the book covers. The study of history must be more than memorizing dates and facts, but in understanding how the people of each era understood the world. This book assists with this.

This text should be on the shelf of every college that offers courses in history or literature, as well as any high school that wishes to stretch the minds of its students.

Since I love to see the themes of classic literature reworked for today's students, I enjoyed all four of the companion plays in this series. The Cowboy and the Wildcat is a really delightful visit to the Shrew-Taming theme, set south of the border. The language is current and and accessible, with plenty of support activities for second language learners. The play text is adaptable for everything from a simple classroom reading and discussion to a complete staging. And students never seem to tire of the possible spin-off theme discussions of love and marriage. Check out these great classroom resources!

othello killed his wife, desdemona in her bedroom in the certain night

Read this book and find out. I was very intrigued by its premises.

Scott Wilson is really weaving together three narratives and three sets of interests here. First, he is interested in telling the story of the rapid rise of Cultural Materialism (known in the US as New Historicism)in the 1980's & 1990's; secondly, he is telling the story of how dominant this new discipline has become in his own field of interest, Shakespeare Studies; and thirdly, he is telling the story of how politicized literary study has become as a result of cultural materialism's success.

Rise of the Discipline:

The seminal figure in the rise of cultural materialism is Raymond Williams, especially the Raymond Williams that was influenced by Althusser's views on the "materiality" of ideology. In fact cultural materialism is an offshoot, or another stage in the ongoing evolution of, cultural studies.
I think one could argue that there is very little difference between Cultural Studies and Cultural Materialism--both are New Left projects interested in the liberatory politics of dissident groups and so the research agendas of both schools are informed by a desire to effect change in society by effecting a change in the way we (scholars, students, citizens) practice culture. One key difference is that while Cultural Studies is informed by a marxist focus on class; Cultural Materialism is a postmarxist discipline that theorizes culture from a number of alternative positions and perspepctives.

The fact that universities are "liberal" is nothing new but the politicizing/radicalizing of the university by the many-tiered front of the New Left has provoked outrage from neo-conservatives who believe the cultural heritage of the west should not be turned into an ideological battleground. The right, Prince Charles for one, believe that the New Left has ruined Shakespeare.

Interestingly enough, however, not all of the criticism against Cultural Materialism or New Historicism has come from the right. As with any New Left project much of the criticism of cultural materialism has come from within its own ranks (dissent from its own dissident readers).

One of the seminal figures of cultural materialism is Michel Foucault (especially the seventies Foucault of _History of Sexuality_) and one of the more radical tiers of the New Left is Queer Studies. Terry Eagleton is one of the more traditional marxists who finds that this particular branch of New Historicism/Cultural Materialism often fetishizes difference for difference sake and that in its search for evidence of sexual oppression and its concomitant search for ever more nuanced varieties of sexual expression real politics have been lost sight of.

Wilson, whose own views are obviously informed by Queer Studies (namely by Dollimore and Sinfield's _Political Shakespeare_), counters that charge.

Interestingly enough one of Wilson's favorite thinkers, Slavoj Zizek, is also skeptical of the New Left and programs that fetishize difference/differance.

Perhaps the most comprehensive criticism of Cultural Materialism, and one that Wilson articulates very well, is that each practitioner can be perceived to be forging their own sometimes highly eclectic and eccentric relationship to cultural products and/or historical epochs and that the work being done under the aegis of Cultural Materialism can be perceived to be many separate scholars each narrating their own personal relationships with Shakespeare or the Renaissance. This charge/criticism is most specifically leveled at New Historicist star Stephen Greenblatt. (And this charge could be leveled at Scott Wilson as well).

Impact on Shakespeare Studies:

The star of Cultural Materialism/New Historicism is without a doubt Stephen Greenblatt and it is fascinating to read Wilson's synopsis of Greenblatt's career. According to Wilson Greenblatt's interest in the past arose out of a childhood fantasy to speak with the dead and that Greenblatt's famous essays are so many attempts to resurrect the past and make it speak. But this highly personal and eccentric approach to history is nothing new, and so this anectdote about Greenblatt is not meant as a criticism. According to Wilson historians have always been poets as much as anything else and that any pretense to objectivity or neutrality is just that, a pretense. For Wilson the Cultural Materialist no longer has to feign disinterestedness from his/her subject matter. In fact, Wilson argues, many Cultural Materialists would encourage scholars to empathize with dissident groups (past and present) and that this empathy is an essential ingredient in the Cultural Materialist project. The idea being that new critical perspectives are formed by forging new affiliations/attachments.

This is certainly not your Father's history-telling, but that is just the point. Cultural materialism is an intervention into the usual Patriarchal history-telling program/agenda. Cultural materialism is meant to disrupt those old programs and agendas (that served kings and princes) and replace them with new programs and agendas(that serve the interests of those who have been marginalized by traditional literary study and history-telling). Wilson is careful to say that problematizing the Father's history by empathizing with various "others" is not the same thing as attempting to speak for those "others" who must remain voiceless and unnarrated. This would be an account that describes some but not all Cultural Materialists for not all Cultural Materialists are working within the same poststurcturalist and postmodernist template. In fact some are not working within that template at all.

Wilson's own readings of Shakespeare's plays (Tempest, Merchant of Venice, Lear) read like de-constructions of what previous Shakespeare scholars have tried to construct: the traditional patriarchical historical scholar has treated Shakepeare's plays as transhistorical narratives espousing eternal "truths". The cultural materialist, on the other hand, is always careful to situate Shakespeare and the plays in their specific historical context and to read them as responses to specific historical contingencies. For instance, according to Wilson's Lacanian/Zizekian reading, Lear is motivated by a feeling that he lacks a mother-nurturer (umbilical connection to earth, connection to the real) and that he wants Cordelia to fill this lack and provide that connection. But since there is a communication breakdown between these two opposing (masculine and feminine) world views/realities/narratives misunderstanding and tragedy ensues. For Wilson Lear's search for a missing mother (representative of the actual, the real, and perhaps a more organic culture) problematizes his relation to the symbolic order that he is supposed to embody. The cultural materialist is always sifting through accepted opinion about Shakespeare and Shakespeare's plays to find the real historical conditions each play can be seen to be negotiating. In Lear, Wilson argues, Shakepseare is negotiating England's shift from a sedentary organic community to a more abstracted and regulated form of community that must be constructed and mediated by language.

Cultural Materialism thus is not so much an attempt to tell new histories or to tell untold histories (though it is, in part, that) but an attempt to show that the conditions of possibility for any work of art are one and the same material conditions of possibility shaping every other apsect of life at any given moment in time.

The Politicized Realm:

To the Cultural Materialist, or at leat to the Lacan and Zizek influenced Scott, the "Histories" that our literary forebears told are often misrepresented by literary critics. The cultural materialist attempts to lift the veils of the various critical ideologies that have mediated our direct access to the literary objects of the past and to "history".

Thus Fredric Jameson's famous "always historicize" to a Cultural Materialist takes on ever keener and more naunced meanings. For the cultural materialist there are no transhistorical truths or transhistorical histories, only contingent truths and histories. And thus while each cultural materialist historicizes his/her Shakespeare, each cultural materialist is also aware of their own historical situatedness and the historical situatedness of their own methods/theories. And any attempt to negotiate our way into the past is always also an attempt to negotiate or find some purchase upon the present.

In Conclusion:

This book is not perfect. Scott often moves from topic to topic a little too swiftly for my taste(perhaps in imitation of Zizek). Even though Scott's own interpretive habits are highly eclectic and maybe a bit too eccentric at times (his use of Bataille just seems to confuse matters), it would seem eclecticism and eccentricity to the Cultural Materialist are virtues and not liabilites. I used this book to introduce myself to this discipline, and though I found myself skimming in some areas I found it provided me with a fairly good foundation for further exploration in this field. I plan to move on to Alan Sinfield's Faultlines next.

This fascinating play is about a very small, ragged, and unmotivated theater company, who under the guidance of their director, the weary but fatherly Curate (who responds to the question "Are you Shakespeare, or are you just God?" by admitting, "I'm just God.") attempt to act out Shakespeare's As You Like It. The two frameworks bounce off each other perfectly to create a hilarious, tragic, and deeply human drama, as funny and heartbreaking as Nigro's best. Definitely worth a go.

This is a book about love, violence, the outsider against society: the forbidden love of Tristan and Isolde, the problem violence in Boiardo's Orlando in Love, Ariosto's analysis of women and society, Spenser in Ireland, and Shakespeare's use of the old romance trope of the custom of the castle.

Cymbelline, a lesser play by the great bard, is rather strange on several counts. It has more plot twists than one play can handle and the characters do some rather strange things. But forget that. This is a great value since it combines fine performances with incredible dialogue and a plot which will keep you guessing.

Wonderful!!

A combination of "Romeo and Juliet," "Much Ado About Nothing," "As You Like It," and "King Lear?" Well, Shakespeare somehow made it work. Of the 4 romances, "Troilus and Cressida," "Pericles," Cymbeline," and "The Winter's Tale," I like "Cymbeline" the best. Early we learn that the king is not happy that his daughter Imogen has married the low born Posthumus. So like "King Lear," we have a king whose rages lead to the alienation of his daughter. Though Asimov points out that Cymbeline is more to be excused: "Cymbeline was getting on in years and his final duty to the state was exactly to arrange a peacful succession. No wonder he was annoyed by Imogen's actions." Posthumus is banished. Moving on, Cymbeline's wife is more sinister. She is willing to poison her stepdaughter Imogen if Imogen will not marry her stepbrother (and the king's stepson) Cloten. But Cornelius substitutes the poison for a knock out juice. Well, Posthumus and Imogen have their tragic farewell. Now we have the "Romeo and Juliet" element. Will these 2 young lovers get back together? Soon, we learn though that this pair of lovers is not quite as likable as Romeo and Juliet. Posthumus is willing to make a bet on the fidelity of his love interest Imogen. (Something we couldn't imagine Romeo doing.) Well, Iachimo is kind of like Don John from "Much Ado About Nothing." Though Iachimo is actually more likable. He doesn't need to actually sleep with Imogen. (He just wants to win the bet.) So he grabs a bracelet so he can make it appear he slept with Imogen. Soon afterwards, we see that Cloten has an unhealthy obsession with Imogen, but Imogen has no feelings for him. (Though a bit of tragic irony is that if Imogen had loved Cloten, it would have been a good wedding. It would have made peace between the king and queen as well as a good marriage for the state. And we will later see that like Posthumus, Imogen is not quite so admirable.) Onto Act 3. We learn of the growing tension between Italy and Britain. Cymbeline defies the Roman Empire, and interestingly, the queen and Cloten show some redeeming traits and stand by Cymbeline in this matter. Now here we come to a trait of Posthumus that is not so admirable. He actually wants his servant Pisanio to kill Imogen for her supposed infidelity. (Would Romeo have done this?) Very quickly, this seems to justify Cymbeline's anger against Imogen. Not only was the marriage to Posthumus dangerous to the safety of thew state, but it seems that Posthumus was merely attracted to Imogen and did not love her. Moving on, Pisanio can not do it, and he encourages Imogen to hide in the wilderness disguised as a man (Fidele) until the many matters can be resolved. Now, here we come to the "As You Like It" element. Like Rosalinde, Imogen disguises herself as a man and runs into members of her family in exile. (Though this is the case of her 2 brothers and neither side knows the other.) Belarius was wrongly accused of treason and 'in a below the belt move' kidnapped two of the king's infant sons. While Belarius seems to love life in the wilderness, the king's 2 sons (who think Belarius is their father) feel that there is more to life. Well, Imogen meets the group and the become fast friends. Meanwhile Cloten is angered by Imogen's disappearance and decides to borrow some of Posthumus's clothes and rape her. Well, in the wilderness, Cloten is killed by Imogen's exiled brother Guiderius. Well as it turns out, Belarius knows that the death of a queen's son is dangerous, but what's done is done. Meanwhile, thanks to the vial from the queen, that is just knock out juice 'thanks to Cornelius' Imogen appears dead. And there is a well worded funeral for both Cloten and Imogen. And here we find something not so admirable about Imogen. She understandably thinks Posthumus is dead. But apparently she forgot that Posthumus was trying to kill her, and she bitterly rebukes Pisanio (who defied his master and went to great lengths to help her)! On top of that, Romantic little Imogen thinks the 3 people who showed kindness to her in the wilderness were but a dream. And just as war is going to break with Italy, she goes into the employ of her father's enemy. (It does seem that whenever romance is involved, audiences are so willing to forgive faults as transparent as they may be!) But let's move on. Poor Cymbeline is not in the best shape. (His queen is ill, Cloten is dead, his daughter has joined the enemy, and war with Italy is about to start.) In act 5 Posthumus seems to grow and realize that to bet on his 'love' to Imogen was wrong as well as wanting to kill her. Thinking she is dead, he vows to fight Italy on her behalf and then let the British execute him. (Well, I'll say this for him. He grows more than Imogen ever does.) War starts bad for the British, and Cymbeline is captured. But Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus rescue Cymbeline, flip the tables, and win the war. Posthumus (after fighting for Cymbeline) allows himself to be taken as an enemy to Britain. In a well done dream, he sees his parents pray to Zeus on his behalf, and Zeus promises happiness awaits Posthumus. Onto the final scene. Cymbeline realizes his wife is dead. But she confessed she was planning to slowly poison Cymbeline so her son Cloten could be king. (We can probably accept this as at least possible.) To make a long scene short, Cymbeline is reunited with his daughter Imogen, and his 2 sons Guiderius and Arviragus. Belarius is pardoned. Posthumus even forgives Iachimo. Interestingly, Posthumus strikes Imogen (while she is still in her male disguise) once more. But Imogen forgives him and they fall in love. And why should we be surprised? Throughout the play, Imogen has been a romantic little doormat. She quickly rebuked Pisanio who was kind to her; she wrote Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus off as a dream. Perhaps part of the happy ending is accepting Imogen's fault in that she can't grow up.

This is the description of this book from the back cover:

"Life in the Renaissance era was very different from today. Most marriages were arranged by parents, and many children did not survive childhood. Meals could be enormous - up to a dozen courses - and the theater was popular entertainment. Discover daily life in Tudor times, from houses and servants to clothing and school.

"This series explores the world in Tudor times through the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote on many themes - from politics and love to warfare and comedy. His works offer a fascinating window into the times in which he lived. Each page features a quotation from Shakespeare that explains an aspect of life in the 16th century."

This book is written for Middle School aged students. In addition to the illustrations created for the book, it also includes reproductions of paintings from the era.