Shakespeare's Dramatic GenresOxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. The history of the genres, or kinds, of drama is one of contradictory traditions and complex cultural assumptions. The divisions established by the original edition of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (the First Folio, 1623) give shape to whole curricula; but, as Lawrence Danson reminds us in this lively book, there is nothing inevitable, and much unsatisfying, about that tripartite scheme. Yet students of Shakespeare cannot avoid thinking about questions of genre; often they are the unspoken reason why classrooms full of smart people fail to agree on basic interpretative issues. Danson's guide to the kinds of Shakespearian drama provides an accessible account of genre-theory in Shakespeare's day, an overview of the genres on the Elizabethan stage, and a provocative look at the full range of Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies. |
From inside the book
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Page 38
... Shake- speare himself . Webster's The White Devil was a failure at its first performance . In the printed version , Webster defends his play . He acknowledges ( ' if it be objected that it is no true dramatic poem ' ) that the play ...
... Shake- speare himself . Webster's The White Devil was a failure at its first performance . In the printed version , Webster defends his play . He acknowledges ( ' if it be objected that it is no true dramatic poem ' ) that the play ...
Page 54
... Shake- speare's history plays . But the comedy's vision of English history as a love story with a happy ending is not irrelevant to Shakespeare's contemporaneous development of ' history ' as a genre that alludes to the conventions of ...
... Shake- speare's history plays . But the comedy's vision of English history as a love story with a happy ending is not irrelevant to Shakespeare's contemporaneous development of ' history ' as a genre that alludes to the conventions of ...
Page 105
... Shake- speare's two tetralogies . It assumes that Shakespeare had the entire plan of the eight plays in mind when he began the first , and that in the decade of composition he never wavered from that plan . Drawing so heavily on Hall's ...
... Shake- speare's two tetralogies . It assumes that Shakespeare had the entire plan of the eight plays in mind when he began the first , and that in the decade of composition he never wavered from that plan . Drawing so heavily on Hall's ...
Contents
The Genres Staged | 30 |
Mr William Shakespeares Comedies | 57 |
History | 86 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
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