Shakespeare's Alternative Tales - Rilegato

Scragg, Leah

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0582244854 ISBN 13: 9780582244856

Casa editrice: Longman Pub Group, 1996

Riassunto

A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for the understanding of his work. In retelling a particular story, a Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern spectator but as essential component, for a contemporary audience, of the meaning of the work.
Shakespeare's Alternative Tales explores this literary dialogue, focusing on those plays in which the expectations generated by an inherited story are in some way overthrown, setting up a tension for a Renaissance spectator between 'received' and 'alternative' readings of the text. Each chapter opens with a familiar story, supplying a context for the subsequent discussion, and exhibits the way in which the dramatist's reworking of a traditional motif interrogates the assumptions implicit in his source.
While offering the twentieth-century reader a fresh perspective from which to view the plays, the approach also supplies an introduction to contemporary readings of the Shakespearian canon. The tales Leah Scragg considers may be seen as 'alternative' in more than one sense; they radically rework conventional situations, while lending themselves to analysis in terms of new critical methodologies.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Leah Scragg is a Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester University.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Longman Pub Group
• Data di pubblicazione: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0582244854
• ISBN 13: 9780582244856
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 168