Women Beware Women, and: The Winter's Tale, and: The Merchant of Venice (review)

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-681
Author(s):  
Steven Mentz
2021 ◽  
pp. 148-175
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright

Chapter 5 argues for the lingering power of medieval values and imaginative forms in their relation to characters who seemingly return from the dead. Criticism has not recognized the extent of this motif in the comedies or the way that it figures in their ongoing actions as well as their endings. Among other values, return from the dead showcases the efficacy of desire on the part of those bereft and the sense of radiant new life that the revenant sometimes acquires. While this motif is usually oriented towards Shakespeare’s late romances, such as Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, it is strikingly pervasive, influential, and mysterious in the earlier comedies, as suggested by revenant characters ranging from Two Gentlemen’s Julia to All’s Well’s Helen. The chapter draws examples extensively from the comedies, including Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night. The motif lends uncanny power, emotional and intellectual depth, and memorability to Shakespearean comedy. It likewise helps us understand the persistence of medieval values into the early modern period.


2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-158
Author(s):  
Cary M. Mazer

Scholars preparing production histories of individual Shakespeare plays have long been faced with the challenges of structuring their studies. The scholar can choose to write a straightforward one-actor-or-production-after-another monograph (Rosenberg on Othello, Ripley on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Bartholomeuz on Macbeth and The Winter's Tale, etc.), a transhistorical encyclopedic scene-by-scene and line-by-line collation (Rosenberg on King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet), a transhistorical interlineated text (Bratton and Hankey's Shakespeare in Production editions, under a variety of different series titles and publishers), or an exemplary-production snapshot album (Mulryne and Bulman's Shakespeare in Performance series).


Author(s):  
Will Stockton

Through readings of Shakespeare and Paul, Members of His Body protests the Christian defense of marital monogamy. If the Paul who authors 1 Corinthians would prefer that unmarried believers remain single, the pseudonymous Paul of the epistle to the Ephesians argues that marriage affords the couple membership in the body of Christ. For neither Paul is plural marriage the antithesis of Christian marriage. For the Paul of Ephesians, plural marriage is rather the telos of Christian community. Building on scholarship regarding early modern sexualities, as well as on political-theological conversations about Pauline universalism, Members of His Body argues that marriage functions in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale as a contested vehicle of Christian embodiment. Shakespeare’s plays query the extent to which man and wife become “one flesh” through marriage, and the extent to which they share that fleshly identity with other Christians. These plays explore the racial, religious, and gender criteria for marital membership in the body of Christ. Finally, they suggest that marital jealousy and paranoia about adultery result in part from a Christian theology of shared embodiment. In the wake of recent arguments that expanding marriage rights to gay people will open the door to the cultural acceptance and legalization of plural marriage, Shakespeare’s plays remind us that much Christian theology already looks forward to this end.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Tom Lockwood

Author(s):  
J. F. Bernard

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.


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