Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority

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University of Toronto Press, 01.01.2003 - 195 Seiten

Original in topic and approach, Searching Shakespeare presents a political-historical exploration of Shakespeare's drama, examining the plays in the context of current ideological concerns - history, memory, marginality, and nationalism. Derek Cohen predicates his argument on the supposition that the individual, as much as the encompassing state, is subject to the shaping forces and machinery of the ideological surround.

Shakespeare's plays, Cohen argues, consistently portray the clash between the passionate search for individuality and the quest for social harmony as irresolvable. The playwright's uncanny ability to carry the reader to the edge of imaginary experience - far from the literal world that is made visible by the text - offers an entry into the subtextual and ironic underside of the dramas. It is in this dark and strange world of slavery, mutilation, sexual jealousy, and suborned murder that the implicit political biases of the plays are most evident and it is here, too, that a modern political analysis reveals why Shakespeare portrayed the quest for individuation and self-expression as necessarily ending in tragedy.

Im Buch

Inhalt

Othello
3
The SelfRepresentations of Othello
85
King Lear and Memory
103
The Figure of the Hit Man
141
Notes
179
Works Cited
187
Urheberrecht

Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen

Autoren-Profil (2003)

Derek Cohen is a professor of English at York University.

Bibliografische Informationen