6 Ergebnisse.

Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies were written in a remarkably short period of time, between 1598 and 1606. Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear are each so singular an achievement that any rereading of them reinforces the awe and almost idolatrous worship that this most uncanny of the world's great writers invariably inspires. In these four plays, Shakespeare engages the problem that is central to tragedy and crucial to any human commu...

William Shakespeare's last four plays carry us across space and time-from classical antiquity to Roman Britain to pagan Sicily to a remote island-and they move as well into a wilder geography of the imagination, one dominated by the wondrous and fantastical, and by reconciliation and renewal. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are famously fraught with shipwrecks and adventures, magic and disguise, speaking statues and eth...

Shakespeare forged his tremendous art in the crucible of his comic imagination, which throughout his life enveloped and contained his tragic one. His early comedies-with their baroque poetic exuberance, intense theatricality, explosive bursts of humor, and superbly concrete realizations of the dialects of love-capture as in a chrysalis all that he was to become. They provide a complete inventory of the mind of our greatest writer in the middle...

Shakespeare's histories-containing within their crowded tableaux all of the tragedies, confusions, and beauties of human life-are not only drama of the highest order. They also serve as windows through which generations have made themselves familiar with crucial episodes in English history. For an Elizabethan England that had already emerged onto the stage of world power and was hungry to understand the sources and nature of its identity, Shak...

William Shakespeare arrived at his splendid maturity as an artist in his second cycle of history plays. With their superb battle scenes, their magnificent major and minor characters, their stories of ambition, usurpation, guilt, and redemption, and their profound ideas about the social order, these plays represent the Elizabethan historical drama in its full glory. And thanks to parts one and two of Henry IV our literature is graced-in the fig...

We read Shakespeare line by line for his supernatural mastery of all the poetic resources of the English language, and play by play for his utterly human, utterly intimate feeling for our condition as individuals and as social beings. Through these works, which deal with the transcendence and the corruption of love, the exigencies of power, the domination of fate, and the algebra of human need, an entire civilization has come to understand its...