We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question of modernity in literature. He directs his attention toward several older poets and examines Shakespeare in particular to show how literary modernity depends, not on chronological considerations, but on the process of mimesis, or imitation, that art has traditionally claimed for itself. In analyzing Shakespeare's major tragedies, Professor Felperin notes that each carries within it a model of its dramatic prototypes, and therefore requires a conservative response from its interpreters. In the interest of being truer to life than its model, however, each play departs from that model and so requires a Romantic or modernist response as well. The author contends that Shakespeare's meaning arises from this ambivalent relation to the forms of the past. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Oftenset in domestic environments and built around protagonists of more modeststatus than traditional tragic subjects, ‘domestic tragedy' was a genre thatflourished on the Renaissance stage from 1580-1620. Shakespeare, Othello, and Domestic Tragedyis the first book to examine Shakespeare's relationship to the genre by way ofthe King's and Chamberlain's Men's ownership and production of many of thedomestic tragedies, and of the genre's extensive influence on Shakespeare's owntragedy, Othello. Drawing in part upon recent scholarship thatidentifies Shakespeare as a co-author of Ardenof Faversham, Sean Benson demonstrates the extensive―even uncanny―tiesbetween Othello and the domestictragedies. Benson argues that just as Hamlet employs and adapts theconventions of revenge tragedy, so Othello can only be fully understoodin terms of its exploitation of the tropes and conventions of domestic tragedy.This book explores not only the contexts and workings of this popular sub-genreof Renaissance drama but also Othello's secure place within it as thequintessential example of the form.

Product Description: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy is a detailed study of the idea of the tragic in the political plays of David Hare, Howard Barker, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, and Jez Butterworth...read more

Product Description: On a coutume, depuis Voltaire, d’opposer Corneille et Racine à Marlowe et à Shakespeare. Leurs traits communs, par contre, sont passés sous silence. En relèvent pourtant quantité d’objets, parties intégrantes de leur univers tragique et qui, anodins parfois en apparence, n’en sont pas moins porteurs de germes mortels : le mouchoir de Desdémone, la pomme d’Ève et, cela va sans dire, l’épée de Rodrigue, les poisons de Médée ou, à la limite, la tête qui trame le crime et la main qui l’exécute...read more

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