Book

Shakespeare and Greece

Findlay, Alison, 1963- editor, Markidou, Vassiliki, editor

Overview

\"This book seeks to invert Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek' and to prove that, in fact, there is more Greek and less Latin in a significant group of Shakespeare's texts: a group whose generic hybridity (tragic-comical-historical-romance) exemplifies the hybridity of Greece in the early modern imagination. To early modern England, Greece was an enigma. It was the origin and idealised pinnacle of Western philosophy, tragedy, democracy, heroic human endeavour and, at the same time, an example of decadence: a fallen state, currently under Ottoman control, and therefore an exotic, dangerous, 'Other' in the most disturbing senses of the word. Indeed, while Britain was struggling to establish itself as a nation state and an imperial authority by emulating classical Greek models, this ambition was radically unsettled by early modern Greece's subjection to the Ottoman Empire, which rendered Europe's eastern borders dramatically vulnerable. Focussing, for the first time, on Shakespeare's 'Greek' texts (Venus and Adonis, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen), the volume considers how Shakespeare's use of antiquity and Greek myth intersects with early modern perceptions of the country and its empire. \"-- Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
• Subject: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 Knowledge Greece. / English drama Greek influences. / English drama Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 History and criticism. / Historical drama, English History and criticism. / LITERARY CRITICISM / Shakespeare. / DRAMA / Shakespeare. / Greece In literature.
• ISBN: 9781474244251

Item info:

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Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
PR3069.G64 S43 2017	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE