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80 results

Page 1 of 4

  • 3 - Shakespeare on Civil and Dynastic Wars

  • Edited by David Loewenstein, Paul Stevens, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War
    Published online:
    17 August 2021
    Print publication:
    14 October 2021, pp 35-53

  • Summary

    From his two historical tetralogies to his great tragedies, civil and dynastic conflict is a near-constant presence in Shakespeare’s plays. This chapter sweeps across his career to explore the political ferment against which he developed his nuanced depictions of civil discord. It begins with the political contexts that shaped the rise of the English history play in the 1590s and extends through the bitter dynastic rivalries that mark Shakespeare’s depictions of Greek and Roman history, his tragedies, and the full body of his plays. It finds that, while Shakespeare studiously avoided taking sides in the warring factions he depicts, he embraced the opportunity to study the genesis of civil strife – its causes, personal motivations, and means by which it is intermittently brought under control. Civil and dynastic conflict serves Shakespeare brilliantly as essential to his craft as playwright, with implications about civil discord at all times and in all places.

Antony and Cleopatra
  • 2nd edition
  • William Shakespeare
  • Edited by David Bevington
  • Published online:
    16 August 2019
    Print publication:
    04 July 2005
  • The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of Antony and Cleopatra, David Bevington has included in his introductory section a thorough consideration of recent critical and stage interpretations, demonstrating how the theatrical design and imagination of this play make it one of Shakespeare's most remarkable tragedies. The edition is attentive throughout to the play as theatre: a detailed, illustrated account of the stage history is followed, in the commentary, by discussion of staging options offered by the text. The commentary is especially full and helpful, untangling many obscure words and phrases, illuminating sexual puns, and alerting the reader to Shakespeare's shaping of his source material in Plutarch's Lives.

  • 4 - William Shakespeare

  • Claude Rawson, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Poets
    Published online:
    28 May 2011
    Print publication:
    27 January 2011, pp 72-103

  • Summary

    In Don Marquis’s enduringly funny Archy and Mehitabel, Archy interviews a parrot named pete who once belonged to the fellow who ran the Mermaid Tavern back around 1600, and who claims to have overheard Bill Shakespeare muttering one night over his pints of sack to Ben Jonson and Frankie Beaumont about his keen disappointment in having been obliged to earn his livelihood as a playwright when he might have been a poet. Archy reports this interview all in lower-case letters and without punctuation, because he is a cockroach pounding out his ruminations night by night on Marquis’s old typewriter, jumping from key to key.

    … any mutt can write

    plays for this london public

    says bill if he puts enough

    murder in them what they want

    is kings talking like kings

    never had sense enough to talk

    and stabbings and stranglings

    and fat men making love

    and clowns basting each

    other with clubs and cheap puns

    and off colour allusions to all

    the smut of the day oh i know

    what the low brows want

    and i give it to them

    …

    to think i am

    debasing my talents with junk

    like that oh god what i wanted

    was to be a poet

    and write sonnet serials

    like a gentleman should

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