Shakespeare's Essays

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter G. Platt
Keyword(s):  
Driving Force ◽  
Stress Fractures ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Multiple Selves ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
English Reading ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
Judicial Rhetoric ◽  
Self Knowledge

This revisionist study argues that the Essais of Montaigne—made available to Shakespeare and the English-reading world via John Florio’s translated Essayes in 1603—were a crucial factor in the composition of later Shakespearean drama. While the change in monarchy, the revived interest in judicial rhetoric, and the alterations in Shakespeare’s acting company undoubtedly helped shape plays such as Measure for Measure, King Lear, and The Tempest, this book contends that Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne is an under-recognized driving force. Both authors quest for approaches to self, knowledge, and form that stress fractures, interruptions, and alternatives. Indeed, Montaigne himself claimed, in his “Of the Force of the Imagination,” that “Some writers there are, whose ende is but to relate the events. Mine, if I could attaine to it, should be to declare, what may come to passe….” In testing—essaying—Montaigne’s writing, Shakespeare, like his French forebear, focuses on possibility, multiple selves, and brave new worlds—what has not been but might yet be.

Triangulation as a Problem in the Plays and Sonnets

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-66
Author(s):  
Richard H. Weisberg
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Public Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Measure For Measure

Abstract As to the risks of what I call the ‘triangulation’ of both public power and private emotion, I extend my earlier treatment of ‘mediation’ in The Merchant of Venice to Measure for Measure, King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest, linking to them Shakespeare’s Sonnet 134. For Shakespeare, whether poet or playwright, a private triangulation of direct romantic obligation is as nettlesome as the public official’s similar behaviour – as when the Duke ‘outsources’ Viennese power to Angelo – and the results are quite as disastrous. The complex and highly legalistic sonnet concerns the triangulation of passion from the speaker to a friend. The beloved winds up ensnaring both through ‘the statute of [her] beauty’. The word ‘surety’ – used centrally in the poem and twice in Merchant – pinpoints, through the delegation to a third party of obligations otherwise charged directly to two committed parties, the underlying Shakespearean problematic

Triangulation as a Problem in the Plays and Sonnets

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-66
Author(s):  
Richard H. Weisberg
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Public Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Measure For Measure

As to the risks of what I call the ‘triangulation’ of both public power and private emotion, I extend my earlier treatment of ‘mediation’ in The Merchant of Venice to Measure for Measure, King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest, linking to them Shakespeare’s Sonnet 134. For Shakespeare, whether poet or playwright, a private triangulation of direct romantic obligation is as nettlesome as the public official’s similar behaviour – as when the Duke ‘outsources’ Viennese power to Angelo – and the results are quite as disastrous. The complex and highly legalistic sonnet concerns the triangulation of passion from the speaker to a friend. The beloved winds up ensnaring both through ‘the statute of [her] beauty’. The word ‘surety’ – used centrally in the poem and twice in Merchant – pinpoints, through the delegation to a third party of obligations otherwise charged directly to two committed parties, the underlying Shakespearean problematic.

Calvin, Shakespeare, and Suspense

2021 ◽  
pp. 182-199
Author(s):  
Claire McEachern
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Statistical Probability ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Future ◽  
Narrative Function

Calvin and Shakespeare both share an interest in the work of suspense; in the former case, as a feature of anticipating salvation (or not); in the latter, as a narrative function of a play’s conclusion. The mediation of Calvinist soteriology in England through the experimentalist thought of William Perkins links Shakespeare to Calvin, in a shared project of anticipating the future, an anticipation informed both by older providentialist models of probability (in which an ending simply confirms a prior pattern) and emergent models of statistical probability (in which the possibility of reversal of prior patterns exists). After an exploration of the logic of ending in Puritan deathbed accounts of Katherine Stubbes, the chapter concludes with a survey of the interplay of urgency and assurance in some of Shakespeare’s endings, those of King Lear and The Tempest in particular.

End-songs: final vistas of Spenser and Shakespeare

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lanier Reid
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Face ◽  
Holistic Design ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Does Spenser’s Mutabilitie Songcomplete his epic,or point to a more transcendent scope in its final half?It derogates the pagan gods; itreforms the titan Mutability (unlike the discarded demon-titans in books 1-6); and its grand pastoral pageantfalls short of the symbolic city toward which the poem moves. Spenser’s holistic design is more clearly implied in his ordering of deadly sins (FQ 1.4). Compared with Dante’s pattern of sins, of purgations, and of ascensions in the Commedia, it offers a vital clue to The Faerie Queene’s format–based on the Christian-Platonismthat informs all its figures and sequences. Much evidence suggests Elizabeth I would admire a mystic structuring of this epic that so honors her. As for Shakespeare’s attentiveness to last things, we explore the theme of ‘summoning’ in Hamlet and King Lear, both concerned–as in The Summoning of Everyman–with ‘readiness’ and ’ripeness’ in the face of death and judgment. In The Tempest’s deft collocation of all social levels and artistic genres, and its odd convergence with Spenserian allegory, we debate the insistence on Shakespeare’s secularism by examining the range of meaning in Prospero’s ‘Art’.

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