King Lear

Author : Jeffrey Kahan
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2008-04-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135973650

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King Lear by Jeffrey Kahan Pdf

Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare’s original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises ‘the play’ is both complex and fragmentary. These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies. Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 712 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 1928
Category : Electronic
ISBN : STANFORD:36105049237840

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A School Shakespeare ... by William Shakespeare Pdf

Author : Tana Wojczuk
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2021-06-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781501199530

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Lady Romeo by Tana Wojczuk Pdf

Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Finalist for the Marfield Prize For fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this “lively, illuminating new biography” (The Boston Globe) of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays a “brisk, beautifully crafted life” (Stacy Schiff, bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra) that riveted New York City and made headlines across America. All her life, Charlotte Cushman refused to submit to others’ expectations. Raised in Boston at the time of the transcendentalists, a series of disasters cleared the way for her life on the stage—a path she eagerly took, rejecting marriage and creating a life of adventure, playing the role of the hero in and out of the theater as she traveled to New Orleans and New York City, and eventually to London and back to build a successful career. Her Hamlet, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Nancy Sykes from Oliver Twist became canon, impressing Louisa May Alcott, who later based a character on her in Jo’s Boys, and Walt Whitman, who raved about “the towering grandeur of her genius” in his columns for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She acted alongside Edwin and John Wilkes Booth—supposedly giving the latter a scar on his neck that was later used to identify him as President Lincoln’s assassin—and visited frequently with the Great Emancipator himself, who was a devoted Shakespeare fan and admirer of Cushman’s work. Her wife immortalized her in the angel at the top of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain; worldwide, she was “a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress.” Behind the scenes, she was equally radical, making an independent income, supporting her family, creating one of the first bohemian artists’ colonies abroad, and living publicly as a queer woman. And yet, her name has since faded into the shadows. Now, her story comes to brilliant life with Tana Wojczuk’s Lady Romeo, an exhilarating and enlightening biography of the 19th-century trailblazer. With new research and rarely seen letters and documents, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of 1800s New York City and featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America forever. The story of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable forgotten figures in our history and restores her to center stage, where she belongs.

Author : Brian Vickers
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2016-04-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780674970335

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The One King Lear by Brian Vickers Pdf

King Lear exists in two different texts: the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623). Because each supplies passages missing in the other, for over 200 years editors combined the two to form a single text, the basis for all modern productions. Then in the 1980s a group of influential scholars argued that the two texts represent different versions of King Lear, that Shakespeare revised his play in light of theatrical performance. The two-text theory has since hardened into orthodoxy. Now for the first time in a book-length argument, one of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars challenges the two-text theory. At stake is the way Shakespeare’s greatest play is read and performed. Sir Brian Vickers demonstrates that the cuts in the Quarto were in fact carried out by the printer because he had underestimated the amount of paper he would need. Paper was an expensive commodity in the early modern period, and printers counted the number of lines or words in a manuscript before ordering their supply. As for the Folio, whereas the revisionists claim that Shakespeare cut the text in order to alter the balance between characters, Vickers sees no evidence of his agency. These cuts were likely made by the theater company to speed up the action. Vickers includes responses to the revisionist theory made by leading literary scholars, who show that the Folio cuts damage the play’s moral and emotional structure and are impracticable on the stage.

Author : Jacob Gordin,Sophie Glazer
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2007-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0300108753

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The Jewish King Lear by Jacob Gordin,Sophie Glazer Pdf

The Jewish King Lear, written by the Russian-Jewish writer Jacob Gordin, was first performed on the New York stage in 1892, during the height of a massive emigration of Jews from eastern Europe to America. This book presents the original play to the English-speaking reader for the first time in its history, along with substantive essays on the play’s literary and social context, Gordin’s life and influence on Yiddish theater, and the anomalous position of Yiddish culture vis-�-vis the treasures of the Western literary tradition. Gordin’s play was not a literal translation of Shakespeare’s play, but a modern evocation in which a Jewish merchant, rather than a king, plans to divide his fortune among his three daughters. Created to resonate with an audience of Jews making their way in America, Gordin’s King Lear reflects his confidence in rational secularism and ends on a note of joyful celebration.

Author : James Shapiro
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2015-09-29
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780571283859

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1606 by James Shapiro Pdf

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear traces Shakespeare's life and times from the autumn of 1605, when he took an old and anonymous Elizabethan play, The Chronicle History of King Leir, and transformed it into his most searing tragedy, King Lear. 1606 proved to be an especially grim year for England, which witnessed the bloody aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, divisions over the Union of England and Scotland, and an outbreak of plague. But it turned out to be an exceptional one for Shakespeare, unrivalled at identifying the fault-lines of his cultural moment, who before the year was out went on to complete two other great Jacobean tragedies that spoke directly to these fraught times: Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Following the biographical style of 1599, a way of thinking and writing that Shapiro has made his own, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear promises to be one of the most significant and accessible works on Shakespeare in the decade to come.

Author : Marvin Rosenberg
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : Drama
ISBN : 087413482X

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The Masks of King Lear by Marvin Rosenberg Pdf

"LEAR: Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? / Who is it that can tell me who I am?" "Centuries of critics and actors have tried to tell, but Lear's identity, and the meaning of his action in the play, are still touched with enigma." "This book seeks Shakespeare's intentions in King Lear in new ways. It explores major interpretations of distinguished actors and directors as well as of critics from England, the United States, France, Belgium, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland. Is the play unsuited for the stage, as Charles Lamb - and others - have declared? How, in fact, has it been staged, and how visualized by critics? Is Lear designed to be a frail and aging old man? A powerful image of authority? Mad, or senile, to begin with? A kindly old father? Everyman? All of these? None? Does the play end with redemption? Unmitigated despair? Is it Christian? Pagan? Mr. Rosenberg confronts these and other questions from the base of his study and personal experience of the play." "To deepen the theatrical side of that experience, he began, as he did in his The Masks of Othello, with an involvement in the staged play: he directed and acted in Othello, and he followed a production of King Lear through two months of rehearsal and performance. One by-product of this intense participation was a discovery of some special qualities in the language of the play." "To achieve a better understanding of these qualities, Mr. Rosenberg put Lear's vocabulary through a computer, and established a concordance of every word both for the play as a whole and for each character. Interesting structural elements in Shakespeare's language become apparent." "Recognizing the difficulty, for a critic, of responding afresh to Shakespeare's craftsmanship in characterization and in arousing expectation, Mr. Rosenberg also arranged to expose the play to spectators who had never seen or read it. The response of this naive audience, after attending performances, was curious and illuminating. The author believes that any critical approach must be used that will increase our understanding of Shakespeare's work."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 1868
Category : Electronic
ISBN : BML:37001105581669

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King Lear by William Shakespeare Pdf

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 1887
Category : Electronic
ISBN : HARVARD:HN63TF

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Tragedy of King Lear by William Shakespeare Pdf

Author : J. R. Thorpe
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2021-12-07
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781643138244

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Learwife by J. R. Thorpe Pdf

Inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear, this breathtaking debut novel tells the story of the most famous woman ever written out of literary history. "I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here." Word has come. Care-bent King Lear is dead, driven mad and betrayed. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear's queen. Exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history, her name forgotten. Now she can tell her story. Though her grief and rage may threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she sent away in shame and disgrace? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend and ally? And what will become of her now, in this place of women? To find peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice - one upon which her destiny, and that of the entire abbey, rests. Giving unforgettable voice to a woman whose absence has been a tantalising mystery, Learwife is a breathtaking novel of loss, renewal and how history bleeds into the present.

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1876
Category : Electronic
ISBN : HARVARD:HN3P6N

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King Lear by William Shakespeare Pdf

Author : Maynard Mack
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0415352967

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King Lear in Our Time by Maynard Mack Pdf

Perhaps more than any other play of Shakespeare's King Lear has been subjected to almost totally contradictory interpretations. An important theme is the play's examination of society and the ties of service and family love.

Author : Jennifer Mulherin,Abigail Frost
Publisher : Cherrytree Books
Page : 36 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1842340468

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King Lear by Jennifer Mulherin,Abigail Frost Pdf

This handsomely illustrated series presents Shakespeare in such a lively and accessible manner that students and young readers will find themselves wishing to read all his plays. Readers learn to enjoy these immortal works as they follow the story, get to know the characters, and explore the historical background of each play. Packed with color illustrations and portraits of the main characters, and enhanced with quotations, these are eye-opening introductions for students as well as valuable tools for teachers.

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2014-12-16
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781443441551

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Sonnets by William Shakespeare Pdf

Among the most enduring poetry of all time, William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets address such eternal themes as love, beauty, honesty, and the passage of time. Written primarily in four-line stanzas and iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s sonnets are now recognized as marking the beginning of modern love poetry. The sonnets have been translated into all major written languages and are frequently used at romantic celebrations. Known as “The Bard of Avon,” William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest English-language writer known. Enormously popular during his life, Shakespeare’s works continue to resonate more than three centuries after his death, as has his influence on theatre and literature. Shakespeare’s innovative use of character, language, and experimentation with romance as tragedy served as a foundation for later playwrights and dramatists, and some of his most famous lines of dialogue have become part of everyday speech. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

Author : William Shakespeare
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 74 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 1860
Category : Drama
ISBN : HARVARD:32044012637575

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King Lear by William Shakespeare Pdf