Shakespeare's Magnanimity; Four Tragic Heroes, Their Friends and Families - Hardcover

HOWARD, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195200659 ISBN 13: 9780195200652

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1978

Synopsis

The field of Shakespearean studies is cluttered with the fossils of past discussions - recorded in words and phrases like 'character,' 'themes,' 'poetic drama,' 'order,' 'vitality,' 'moral vision' and somehow or other we have to pick our way round them. In a prefatory dialogue the reader finds himself in the company of those obstructive entities and of their often amiable proponents, here attempting to state a reading of Twelfth Night and failing because of incompatible notions of 'how to read.' The brisk argument that ensues opens questions which have too long been closed. The four essays in this book, on Hamlet, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, are, in the same spirit, unspecialized, free-ranging and openly argumentative. The authors' lively and entertaining procedure is accounted for, not as a lack of seriousness, but by their understanding that 'comedy is the friend of the serious and seeks to protect it from the preposterous.' Thus the readings are by no means always the familiar ones. The idea that Coriolanus is a thinking man, or that comic inspiration predominates in Hamlet, may surprise at first sight. But the argument is tied at all points to the text and the scene, and can be met, stimulatingly, on that ground. Shakespeare wrote out of and about a common humanity and it is with humanity, common and uncommon, that we must read or watch him. This book is accordingly addressed as much to the ordinary literate reader or playgoer as to the academic or the student.

About this title

About the Author

Wilbur Sanders (1936-2002) was born and brought up in New Zealand, and graduated from Melbourne University. He went on to become a lecturer and fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, retiring in 2001. His books include The Dramatist and the Recieved Idea (1968), John Donne's Poetry (1971), and two novels, Like the Big Wolves (1985) and Hector's Folly (1995). Howard Jacobson has written fourteen novels and five works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question and was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for his most recent novel, J. Howard Jacobson's first book, Shakespeare's Magnanimity, written with the scholar Wilbur Sanders, was a study of four Shakespearean heroes. Many books later he has returned to Shakespeare with Shylock is My Name, a contemporary interpretation of The Merchant of Venice.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0195200659
• ISBN 13: 9780195200652
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 187