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62 results

Page 1 of 4

  • Chapter 20 - Love
    • from Part II - Emotions
  • Edited by Katharine A. Craik, Oxford Brookes University
  • Book: Shakespeare and Emotion
  • Published online: 01 October 2020
  • Print publication: 22 October 2020, pp 288-301
  • View extract

    Summary

    This chapter argues that while Shakespeare has no single or overarching theory or view of love, specific patterns or tendencies are evident in both the plays and the poems. It focuses on three characteristics of such a disposition: the singularity of the beloved (‘you are you’) that admits of no substitute; the essentially projective rather than reactive vision of love (‘love sees not with the eyes but with the mind’); and the perhaps counterintuitive fact that love is not an emotion as such, but rather a disposition or form of behaviour that involves different, sometimes contradictory, emotions. This puts Shakespeare at odds with contemporary, Galenic theories of love as one of the most volatile of the passions. The Sonnets, for example, are virtually devoid of references to contemporary psychology, and the chapter focusses on these poems to explore the rich varieties of emotion they express in their complex and fraught negotiations of love and desire. Classifying and arranging the sonnets in accordance with the emotions expressed in them furthermore does not accord with the usual narrative attributed to them.

  • Content but Also Unwell: Distributed Character and Language in The Merchant of Venice
  • Edited by Emma Smith, University of Oxford
  • Book: Shakespeare Survey 72
  • Published online: 18 September 2019
  • Print publication: 12 September 2019, pp 243-255
  • View extract

    Summary

    Character, so central to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century appreciation of Shakespeare, fell out of favour in the mid twentieth century. This first occurred at the hands of the ‘New Criticism’. L. C. Knights, in ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, was instrumental in the classic shift of critical focus from the life and humanity of the fictional people in Shakespeare’s plays (exemplified by A. C. Bradley)1 to a view of the texts as elaborate poetic forms, to be read for their network of figurative structures and connections rather than for the psychology of their characters.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language
  • The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language
  • Edited by Lynne Magnusson, David Schalkwyk
  • Published online: 01 July 2019
  • Print publication: 08 August 2019
  • View description
    The power of Shakespeare's complex language - his linguistic playfulness, poetic diction and dramatic dialogue - inspires and challenges students, teachers, actors and theatre-goers across the globe. It has iconic status and enormous resonance, even as language change and the distance of time render it more opaque and difficult. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language provides important contexts for understanding Shakespeare's experiments with language and offers accessible approaches to engaging with it directly and pleasurably. Incorporating both practical analysis and exemplary readings of Shakespearean passages, it covers elements of style, metre, speech action and dialogue; examines the shaping contexts of rhetorical education and social language; test-drives newly available digital methodologies and technologies; and considers Shakespeare's language in relation to performance, translation and popular culture. The Companion explains the present state of understanding while identifying opportunities for fresh discovery, leaving students equipped to ask productive questions and try out innovative methods.

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