Description
Oxford Circumstantial Shakespeare 2018 Edition by Lorna Hutson
Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement-imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. This view has survived the assaults of various literary theories and has even, surprisingly, been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare's_x000D_characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. _x000D_Circumstantial Shakespeare explodes these venerable critical commonplaces. Drawing on sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (of Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images. 'Circumstances' - which we now think of as incalculable contingencies - were originally topics of forensic inquiry into human intention or passion. In drawing on the Roman forensic tradition of circumstantial proof,_x000D_Shakespeare did not ignore time and place. His brilliant innovation was to use the topics of circumstance to imply offstage actions, times and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. His plays thus create both their own vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense_x000D_of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them._x000D__x000D_Circumstantial Shakespeare offers new readings of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lucrece, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Macbeth, as well as new interpretations of Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy. It engages with eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, Roman forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of modern probability, psychoanalytic criticism and sixteenth-century constitutional_x000D_thought._x000D_ Table of Contents :- _x000D_
Introduction 1: 'Quando?' (When?) in Romeo and Juliet 2: 'Imaginary Work': Opportunity in Lucrece and in King Lear 3: Where and How? Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Maid's Tragedy 4: 'The Innocent Sleepe': Motive in Macbeth Conclusion Bibliography Index_x000D_