Shakespearean Poetry and the Romantics

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Henry Mackenzie ◽  
Thomas Gray ◽  
Tintern Abbey

The response of the major Romantic poets to Shakespeare is multifaceted. But recognition of Shakespearean vitality and suggestiveness is pervasive. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Blake’s colour-print ‘Pity’ and an account of pre-Romantic responses to Shakespeare (notably in the criticism of Henry Mackenzie and Samuel Johnson, and the poetry of Thomas Gray). It then explores, in turn, the responses of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats to Shakespeare, discussing how the Romantics use Shakespearean resonances in their poetry: Wordsworth, for example, echoing a number of plays to suggestive effect in the concluding movement of Tintern Abbey; Coleridge alluding to Twelfth Night at the close of ‘The Nightingale’; Keats drawing on various texts in shaping the mingling of romance and anti-romance in The Eve of St. Agnes. The essay seeks to intimate the range and depth of Romantic poetry’s orchestration of the Shakespearean bequest.

‘More, I prithee, more’: Melancholy, Musical Appetite and Medical Discourse in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Iselin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

Pierre Iselin broaches the subject of early modern music and aims at contextualising Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most musical comedies, within the polyphony of discourses—medical, political, poetic, religious and otherwise—on appetite, music and melancholy, which circulated in early modern England. Iselin examines how these discourses interact with what the play says on music in the many commentaries contained in the dramatic text, and what music itself says in terms of the play’s poetics. Its abundant music is considered not only as ‘incidental,’ but as a sort of meta-commentary on the drama and the limits of comedy. Pinned against contemporary contexts, Twelfth Night is therefore regarded as experimenting with an aural perspective and as a play in which the genre and mode of the song, the identity and status of the addressee, and the more or less ironical distance that separates them, constantly interfere. Eventually, the author sees in this dark comedy framed by an initial and a final musical event a dramatic piece punctuated, orchestrated and eroticized by music, whose complex effects work both on the onstage and the offstage audiences. This reflection on listening and reception seems to herald an acoustic aesthetics close to that of The Tempest.

Shakespearean Melancholy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Core ◽  
Robert Burton

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare’s comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and, conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton, and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What’s so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy.

‘The case appears too liquid’: The Two Sides of Androgyno

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Hui
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Two Sides

Drawing attention to the subplot of Lady Would-be, the chapter untangles the differences between the androgyne and the hermaphrodite with the use of Freud and Lacan, comparing Volpone with The Symposium, Metamorphoses, Twelfth Night and Epicoene, demonstrating the two meanings of being an androgyne in Jonson. While it is suggested that fools ‘are the only nation / worth men’s envy or admiration’ (1.2.66-67), this chapter argues that Jonson’s androgyne is more like a eunuch, which can be read as an unconscious slip on the part of the dramatist.

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