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William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
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 William
Shakespeare the Complete Works by
William Shakespeare
The new Oxford edition of Shakespeare's complete
works reconsiders every detail of their text and presentation in
the light of modern scholarship. The nature and authority of the
early documents are re-examined, and the canon and chronological
order of composition freshly established. Spelling and punctuation
are modernized, and there is a brief introduction to each work, as
well as an illuminating and informative General Introduction. OUP
and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre this year embark on an official
partnership to celebrate the plays both in print and performance
-- this reissued and rejacketed edition of the complete works
underscores the commitment.
 Lectures
on Shakespeare by W.
H. Auden, Arthur C. Kirsch (Editor)
After transplanting
himself from England to the United States in 1939, W.H. Auden
immediately became a kind of academic knight-errant, teaching at
five different schools in as many years. Little evidence survives
of most of these gigs. But in 1946, Auden gave a course on
Shakespeare at Manhattan's New School, and luckily, several of the
students attending took maniacally assiduous notes. Now Arthur
Kirsch has collated the whole batch--and, one assumes, done some
major nip-and-tuck work on this textual nightmare. The result is
an insightful, eccentric, and perhaps essential slice of
Bardolatry, which tells us as much about Auden as his subject.
Nobody can accuse Auden of parroting the party
line on this greatest of English writers. In one of the nuttier
moments in the lecture series, in fact, he expressed his distaste
for The Merry Wives of Windsor by declining to say a word
about it--instead he simply played a recording of Verdi's Falstaff
for the perplexed audience. Elsewhere his tendency was to view
Shakespeare's creations as flesh-and-blood characters rather than
poetic constructs: "If Antony and Cleopatra have a more
tragic fate than we do, that is because they are far more
successful than we are, not because they are essentially
different." He's harder pressed to locate any success stories
in Julius Ceasar: the protagonist strikes him as a fading
despot, Octavius is "a very cold fish," and Cassius
"a choleric man--a General Patton." And sometimes, as in
this discussion of Falstaff's role in the double-decker Henry
IV, Auden spins off his own freestanding riffs, which amount
to short prose poems on Shakespearean themes:
A fat man looks like a cross between a very young
child and a pregnant mother. The Greeks thought of Narcissus as
a slender youth, but I think they were wrong. I see him as a
middle-aged man with a corporation, for, however ashamed he may
be of displaying it in public, in private a man with a belly
loves it dearly--it may be an unprepossessing child to look at,
but he's borne it all by himself.
Auden would return to the Bard's terrain many times
in his career, most notably in "The Sea and the Mirror."
But for sheer penetration and puckish humor, Lectures on
Shakespeare is hard to beat, and demonstrates that for all
their differences, both the speaker and his subject had a crucial
thing in common--what Auden calls "a fabulously good taste
for words." --James Marcus
Homosexual
Desire in Shakespeare's England : A Cultural Poetics by
Bruce R. Smith
In the most comprehensive study yet of
homosexuality in the English Renaissance, Bruce R. Smith examines
and rejects the assessments of homosexual acts in moral
philosophy, laws, and medical books in favor of a poetics of
homosexual desire. Smith isolates six different "myths"
from classical literature and discusses each in relation to a
particular Renaissance literary genre and to a particular part of
the social structure of early modern England. Smith's new Preface
places his work in the context of the continuing controversies in
gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies.
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By Govind
Excerpt:
Homosexuality is another sensitive issue in
modern society, and homosexual and gender issues (e.g.
cross-dressing) in Shakespeare's work have come under attack
recently. In 1996, Merrimack, New Hampshire schools banned Twelfth
Night when the school board prohibited "alternative
lifestyle instruction." (Ockerbloom)
Does Twelfth Night even truly depict "alternative
lifestyles", much less "instruct" one in them? The Christian
Science Monitor also listed Twelfth Night as one of
the books challenged in school libraries in 1996-97, presumably
for the same incident...
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J. L. Simmons, The Johns Hopkins University
Death and desire, murder and homoerotics, are
juxtaposed in this vaguely sado-masochistic environment, a kind of
explosively erotic violence that we can see in B. R. Burg's study
of sodomy as an erotic cult of male bonding among
seventeenth-century pirates. Bruce Smith has recently reminded us
of the generic association of the pastoral world with
homoeroticism, and Shakespeare reinvigorates the classical scene
with the native homoerotics of Robin Hood's merry band...
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By David M. Halperin
Excerpt:
Hercules sets the stage for such modern figures
as Shakespeare's Mark Antony, who claims Hercules as his literal
ancestor in Antony and Cleopatra and who incurs similar
charges of effeminacy when he takes time out from ruling the Roman
Empire to live a life of passion and indulgence with Cleopatra.
The roles of ruler and lover are made to contrast from the very
opening of the play, when Antony is described as "the triple
pillar of the world transform'd / Into a strumpet's fool"
(1.1.12-13). Antony is not unique in Shakespeare. Othello also
voices anxieties about the incapacitating effects of conjugal love
on a military leader. But this tension is best represented by
Shakespeare's Romeo, who, berating himself for a lack of martial
ardor and invoking the traditional opposition between the cold,
wet melancholia of love and the hot, dry nature of masculine
virtue, exclaims...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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