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Greenblatt, Stephen: Shakespeare’s Freedom

November 2012
Kritikon Litterarum 39(3-4)

DOI:10.1515/kl-2012-0131

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The Relative Nature of Bondage and Freedom in Shakespeare’s the Merchant of Venice

September 2015

The study of bondage and freedom is the key subject in the critical analysis and appreciation of Shakespeare’s magnificent play, The Merchant of Venice. Despite the fact that the topic has been already considered and investigated in detail by some critics, it has yet to be stretched a little further. The target of this study is to develop the analysis of the topic of bondage and freedom with ... [Show full abstract] emphasis on the relative nature of their existence. By studying the relative nature of bondage and freedom (or release) in the play, we can understand the underlying structure of the relationships in this complex play, the play which is as dependent on plot structure as on character development. The development in this play is not linear but circular. It is circular due to the relativity of the bondage that binds the people with one another. Although we have touched the main areas of bondage and release and expounded on the major types of them, the present research points to the fact that every single one of these topics can be studied separately and end in interesting details about the play yielding better understanding of it to the readers.

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Von Balthasar’s theological dramatic theory is deeply indebted to Hegel, especially to Hegel’s distinction between epic, lyric and dramatic genres. He criticizes the Hegelian identification of divine with human freedom and argues that analogy alone can express the fact that God’s freedom is ‘ever greater’. But his Hegelian tendencies corrupt his use of analogy and incline him to generalize and ... [Show full abstract] impose resolution on patterns of divine-human relation (especially in his Marian theology of the Church). His readings of Shakespeare and Scripture reflect the same tendencies. Thus von Balthasar fails adequately to respect what is existential and open-ended. This is confirmed in his treatment of the Eucharist. It indicates a deficiency in his theodramatics, and the need to develop his project using a different and less Hegelian dramatic theory.

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L. A. Hamerlynck

Reviews the book, The Freedom of Man in Myth by Kees W. Bolle. Had myths never existed, man would be obliged to invent them. Far from being the product of "primitive" or "inferior" mentality, myths have appeared in all times and all places. They continue to be created and appreciated in contemporary society. Forever beset by the incongruities of the human situation and the necessity to face up to ... [Show full abstract] life's realities under the shadow of death, man spins out stories that will release him from his finitude. An important factor in myth is humor. Elaborating on four elements of humor originally propounded by Jean Paul and including the "dimming of opposites" and the use of the "grotesque," Dr. Bolle traces humor from the earliest oriental myths, to such writers as Shakespeare and Heine, and straight through to such modern authors as Gunter Grass. Within the mainstream of mythology appears a special kind of myth-maker--the mystic. Many a parallel between myth and mysticism is traced by Dr. Bolle, and he observes a current revival of interest in both.

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The contemporary staging of Women's bodies raises both practical and theoretical issues, and in both text-based theatre and performance art women theatre artists are currently engaging these challenges in inventive ways. Drawing upon the inland expanses and ontological freedoms of the American Midwest, the women at the Omaha Magic Theatre have recently premiered two collaboratively written plays, ... [Show full abstract] Body Leaks and Sound Fields, which use image, action, technology, and text to engage issues of gender, identity, sexuality, and the material body. In these issues, the spectator is prohibited from making direct relations between body and self, and must instead come to terms with a web of relationships which include the self, the physical body, the community, and the environment. Susan Carlson, a professor of English at lowa State University, has written two books on theatrical comedy, most recently Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is currently working on the contemporary performance of Aphra Behn's plays, and is writing a book on the connections between productions of Shakespeare at the turn of the twentieth century and early suffrage theatre.

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Jenny de Reuck

New Historical" approaches have allowed for the reinvention of Shakespearean productions in a variety of adaptive processes that operate in many instances "against the grain". The politics of performance has never been more visible than in many recent productions both in Australia and internationally. This paper argues that the "space" between the actor and the character in Shakespeare's dramas ... [Show full abstract] is most creatively negotiated with young performers if the excitement of Shakespeare's intersubjective potential is unleashed and their performances are allowed the freedom of expression that more overtly politicised constraints may inhibit. Drawing on the praxis-led research undertaken with final year, Honours and postgraduate students in the Creative Arts at Murdoch University (2009) this paper will offer a case study of a production of Twelfth Night. 1 "Space" in this context is presented as a field of orientation whose alignments flow from the central sensibilities of the dominant characters in the play.

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The essay examines some forms of the actual interaction between the different social actions of the law and the theatre in early modern England. Both the theatrical and the legal practice were divided between the comparative ‘freedom’ of oral performance and the equally comparative stability of written texts. Actors' and lawyers' training made use of written texts and performance styles which ... [Show full abstract] show clear resemblance in form and in (collaborative) method. The legal exercises were a mandatory part of the law students' training and were perhaps meant to be used as library material in each of the Inns. The Comedy of Errors, by Shakespeare, first performed at Gray's Inn, inscribed within this synergic and collaborative practice, focuses on the problematic issue of oral promises and written contracts in the rising merchant economy of early modern England.

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Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, has been central to English poetry since the Renaissance. It is the basic vehicle of Shakespeare's plays and the form in which Milton chose to write Paradise Lost. Milton associated it with freedom, and the Romantics, connecting it in turn with freethinking, used it to explore change and confront modernity, sometimes in unexpectedly radical ways. Henry ... [Show full abstract] Weinfield's detailed readings of the masterpieces of English blank verse focus on Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Stevens. He traces the philosophical and psychological struggles underlying these poets' choice of form and genre, and the extent to which their work is marked, consciously or not, by the influence of other poets. Unusually attuned to echoes between poems, this study sheds new light on how important poetic texts, most of which are central to the literary canon, unfold as works of art.

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In this essay, I argue that the etymology and function of livery in the early modern period suggests not only servitude, of which livery was a visual marker, but also forms of geographical, economic, and legal freedom. “Livery” itself was a fraught term, denoting clothing that identified one as a servant attached to a particular household or patron, while conceptually suggesting the “freedom” ... [Show full abstract] from which the word derived. Through readings of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, and Cooke's Greene's Tu Quoque, among several other texts, this essay reveals the paradoxes of freedom and constraint apparent in both the linguistic histories and the material markers of livery and explores the legal fictions they animate and sustain. Outlining five different kinds of livery in the period, this essay furthermore argues that early modern drama signals an understanding of livery both as an aspect of early capitalism, indebted to newer forms of credit and commerce, and as nostalgia for feudal attachment and constraint. (U.C.)

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Experiences of authority in the tempest

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This chapter analyses Shakespeare’s delineation of the tensions in hierarchic society as embodied in the form of master–servant relations in The Tempest. In a drama where the words ‘free’, ‘freedom’, and ‘liberty’ occur twenty times, the chapter ponders the hidden injuries of class: the damaging effects on personhood of subordination and domination as revealed in the relationships of Ariel and ... [Show full abstract] Caliban with Prospero. Sustaining uneasy ascendancy through physical harm and threat, cowing the spritely Ariel into moments of tense, monosyllabic obedience, and deforming the irrepressibly social Caliban with a stream of contempt and taught disgust, Prospero’s rigidly hierarchic order strips master–servant relations of any sense of mutual benefit, thereby violating contemporary ideals of service.

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Julián Jiménez Heffernan

This article examines the way in which Julius Caesar and other related plays by Shakespeare helped to closely shape both the themes and ideological structure in Victor Hugo's Cromwell. Traditional approaches to the Shakespeare-Hugo conjunction have limited their analysis to the two critical texts by Hugo, the Preface to Cromwell and his book William Shakespeare. These approaches tend to be vague ... [Show full abstract] and ingenuous, as they commonly take at face value whatever Hugo had to say about his plays, without verifying whether Shakespeare is actually or not a determinant influence in his dramatic oeuvre. By exploring textual parallelisms between Shakespeare's plays and Cromwell, this article aims to lay down a firmer textual basis for this important comparative site. The analysis is moreover conducted within a speculative frame that accords to the category of revolution a decisive role in Hugo's poetics. A logic of resurrectionary iteration and uncanny causality is held to govern the process of literary appropriation by means of which a prominent exponent of Romantic freedom reactivates Shakespearean transgression in order to deploy an English historical drama of usurpation, revolution and tyrannicide. Recent work on Julius Caesar by Richard Wilson and other critics lends support to my claims.

Last Updated: 22 Oct 2024

Greenblatt, Stephen: Shakespeare’s Freedom

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