Teaching with Shakespeare: Critics in the ClassroomBruce McIver, Ruth Stevenson University of Delaware Press, 1994 - 269 pages "Today the number and nature of interpretive strategies developed by contemporary theorists for reading Shakespeare's texts may not only delight but also disconcert the scholars, critics, teachers, and students who study them. In this work, six leading Shakespearean scholar-critics, in a series of clear and elegant lectures delivered to undergraduate English majors, explain distinctive procedures that they and other influential, contemporary critics use for interpreting Shakespeare's poems and plays. Workshops, which illustrate with Shakespearean texts the practice of specific methods, follow the lectures." "Helen Vendler (Harvard) guides readers to Shakespeare's poetry by explaining and illustrating how to hear the unexpected and unobtrusive but crucial questions that sonnets pose, and by tracing the increasingly powerful perceptions that precise, informed aesthetic responses to these questions evoke. R. A. Foakes (UCLA) identifies basic cultural issues underlying traditional approaches to teaching Shakespeare's plays, especially the tragedies, and explains how poststructuralist responses to these issues lead to a reevaluation of the "Bard." Leah Marcus (U. Texas, Austin) also explains cultural issues, particularly about the "construct" that has become "Shakespeare," and introduces editorial questions about the actual textual versions offered to students, notably of Hamlet and King Lear. With emphasis on the plays in performance, John Wilders (Oxford, Middlebury) delivers a structure-oriented, acting-centered analysis of Julius Caesar and then directs, in similar fashion, a production of the first scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Patricia Parker (Stanford), on the other hand, follows intricate lines of wordplay through a series of deconstructions and reconstructions in The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Bringing the series to a close, Annabel Patterson (Duke) presents an explicitly issue-oriented analysis of editorial, critical, scholarly, dramatic, and cinematic interpretations of Henry V; and she offers a concluding commentary on the workshops of her colleagues."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
From inside the book
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Page 70
... production " denied political weight , what- ever that means ( production of wealth by workers , or production of the play ? ) . Alternatively , those who argue for treating the play - text as a score or script may go overboard in a ...
... production " denied political weight , what- ever that means ( production of wealth by workers , or production of the play ? ) . Alternatively , those who argue for treating the play - text as a score or script may go overboard in a ...
Page 143
... production of Hamlet and exclaiming , " Weren't the image clusters magnificent ! " or " What a superb treatment of the themes of purgation and disease " ? What draws audiences to productions of Shakespeare's plays is first and foremost ...
... production of Hamlet and exclaiming , " Weren't the image clusters magnificent ! " or " What a superb treatment of the themes of purgation and disease " ? What draws audiences to productions of Shakespeare's plays is first and foremost ...
Page 230
... production with American filmgoers can sug- gest to them the relevance of Shakespeare's play to ourselves , our political self - consciousness , and to our contested value systems . Lacking a live theatrical tradition , film gives us ...
... production with American filmgoers can sug- gest to them the relevance of Shakespeare's play to ourselves , our political self - consciousness , and to our contested value systems . Lacking a live theatrical tradition , film gives us ...
Contents
List of Figures | 9 |
The Merry | 17 |
Poems Posing Questions 2323 | 37 |
Copyright | |
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Teaching with Shakespeare: Critics in the Classroom Bruce McIver,Ruth Stevenson Limited preview - 1994 |
Teaching with Shakespeare: Critics in the Classroom Bruce McIver,Ruth Stevenson No preview available - 1994 |
Common terms and phrases
actors adjectives Antony audience blame bliss Branagh Caesar characters classroom Cordelia couplet cozening critics cultural cultural materialists daughter death Demetrius dramatic Duke edition Elizabethan English example extreme Falstaff father feel Folio version French Germans Goneril Goneril and Regan grammar Hamlet hath haue Helen Vendler Henry Hermia interpretation Jonathan Dollimore Julius Caesar Kent kind King Lear language Latin Lear's literary London look Lord lovers lust Lysander Marcus mean Merry Wives Midsummer Night's Dream moral night nouns Okay Oxford performance plot poem political poststructuralist Pyramus Pyramus and Thisbe Quarto version quatrain question Renaissance revenge scene sense Shakespeare's plays Shakespeare's sonnets soliloquy sonnet speak speech stage Stephen Booth Teaching Shakespeare textual theater thee there's Theseus thing ThinkPad Thisby thou tion translation University Press Vendler wall Wilders wordplay words