Shakespeare on the Stage in Restoration Dublin

PMLA ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. C. Bald
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
The Other ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Original Volume ◽  
Timon Of Athens

The Folger Shakespeare Library possesses a number of separate plays, all from the Shakespearian Third Folio, and all bearing unmistakable signs of theatrical annotation. They were acquired by Mr. Folger from a variety of sources: the majority were bought from a bookseller in Munich, one was purchased in London, and another came with the Warwick Castle collection of Shakespeariana. There are nine plays in all: The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, but three of them—The Merry Wives, Macbeth, and Othello—are imperfect. It soon became clear that they were all from the same original volume, which, apparently, had belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps and was dismembered by him. The bindings of the separate plays—half leather, with boards of marbled paper or purplish-brown cloth—are obviously all the work of one binder, and are similar to the bindings of other books which have passed through Halliwell-Phillipps's hands. In addition, his handwriting is to be found in six of them: in The Merry Wives and Macbeth there is an inscription on one of the preliminary flyleaves, and in the other four there is a mere “C. and P.” on a fly-leaf at the end of the book.

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.

Shakespeare’s Portrayal of a Tyrant

Moreana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (Number 193- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 40-53
Author(s):  
Peter Milward
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sir Walter Raleigh ◽  
The Ideal

The theme of tyranny, so central (as we have seen in two recent issues of Moreana) to the writings and the experience of Thomas More, is hardly less central to the plays and the memory of William Shakespeare. This centrality appears not so much in the plays of his Elizabethan period as in those of the subsequent Jacobean period, especially in the final romances by way of warming up to his presentation of the historical romance of Henry VIII. There, however, the tyranny of the king, though notably emphasized by Sir Walter Raleigh in his contemporaneous History of the World, is strangely muted, as also is his un-Shakespearian character, but it comes out strongly in the two preceding romances of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, once we read them, as they require us to read them, as “topical allegories”. Then, to the characters of the jealous Leontes and the wrathful Cymbeline, we may add the threatening personality of Antiochus at the beginning of Pericles, as yet another figure (based on a widespread rumour) of the quintessential tyranny of Henry VIII. At the same time, this figure of the victimizer calls to be qualified by the complementary figure of the victim, the heroine in these romances, not only Hermione and Perdita, Thaisa and Marina, and Imogen, but even or especially in Desdemona as victimized by her jealous husband Othello. Then, in the above mentioned “topical allegory” of these Jacobean plays, she stands as well for the ideal of the Virgin Mary as for the memory of Catholic England at the heart of the dramatist.

Water Memory and the Art of Preserving

2018 ◽  
pp. 205-219
Author(s):  
Julie Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

‘Water memory’ was a phrase coined in the late twentieth century to refer to the supposed ability of water to retain a memory of previously dissolved substances even after numerous dilutions. Though now a disproven scientific theory, ‘water memory’ is, as metaphor, a powerful conceptual tool for understanding Shakespeare’s comedies and their engagement with cultures of memory. Plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and All’s Well That Ends Well presage later dramas in the canon, including Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, with their narratives of grief, remembrance and preservation. This essay considers these topics in relation to everyday household practices of pickling and preserving foodstuffs and the deeper traces of customary practice and religious rite in post-Reformation England.

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