Shakespeare - Science topic

Thank you for your response. Shakespeare couldn't have read The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, as he died in 1616, five years before the book's publication in 1621. However, since Hamlet's character is marked by timelessness and modernity, this book could still help individuals who share some melancholic characteristics with Hamlet.

Less the cost of divorce ...

The Hollow Crown uses discussions of the plays and their characters to illuminate the careers of real-life historical figures. These figures range from admirable, even heroic individuals such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to less—sometimes far less—sympathetic ones such as Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler.

In addition, Cohen’s pithy summaries of the lessons that the plays teach provide a series of maxims about the three stages of the arc of power:

On seizing power:

. . . like many a successful conspirator, he [Octavius in Julius Caesar] succeeds in part by being underrated.

On wielding power:

On losing power:

William Shakespeare understood power: what it is, how it works, how it is gained, and how it is lost.  In The Hollow Crown, Eliot A. Cohen reveals how the battling princes of Henry IV and scheming senators of Julius Caesar can teach us to better understand power and politics today. The White House, after all, is a court—with intrigue and conflict rivaling those on the Globe’s stage—as is an army, a business, or a university. And each court is full of driven characters, in all their ambition, cruelty, and humanity. Henry V’s inspiring speeches reframe John F. Kennedy’s appeal, Richard III’s wantonness illuminates Vladimir Putin’s brutality, and The Tempest’s grace offers a window into the presidency of George Washington.  An original and incisive perspective, The Hollow Crown shows how Shakespeare’s works transform our understanding of the leaders who, for good or ill, make and rule our world.

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No , dear Stanley Wilkin ; it is a matter of classical reception, careful reading and comparative learning transfers into our modern times.

Thanks for the brilliant question !

Micro aggression tends to be usually felt in our every day life.In literature, we can find many examples for it.I think that it is tackled mostly in modern novels and drama genres .

Maybe a bit cheezy, but "preventing tragedies IS performing miracles" in my opinion. Then again, negative news are always more reported and recognized than positive news, so if if someone performs an extraordinarily good feat, they will be only awarded, if at all, for a very short time.

بامكانك الاطلاع على ماقدمته النظريات النقدية الحديثة ولاسيما بما يخص النقد المقارن

Interest in really good authors will continue because there are ongoingly new things discovered in their work or in whatever is related to that. If, for example, what you have been told about Shakespeare was true, there would not now be anyone writing about him, but many are. It is "safe" to work on this assumption, BUT you must read a lot of work by other authors if you choose these "big names". However, that is not uninteresting, and it is a joy to work on good authors per se. That is certainly what I myself have experienced, and I have no regrets. Promotion may be slower, but the authors compensate for that!

Fanfic

Drear Nileon, thank you very much. I appreciate your kind invitation to read th pp about the topic of the relationship between music and humour which I will discover through your great work.

I agree with you about universal values and would offer the following from C.S. Lewis’s Introduction to On The Incarnation by Athanasius:

"Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook - even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united - united with each other and against earlier and later ages - by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true, they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false, they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately, we cannot get at them."

Since Bertolt Brecht was a self-professed Marxist, he would probably have been pleased with contemporary world politics today!

Ahah, ok, thanks Rhoderick McNeill

Shakespeare's poetic and dramatic works can be translated from the Renaissance English in which they are written, but a significant loss would occur with respect to both linguistic features and aesthetics.

For one thing, the depth, breadth, and sheer density of William Shakespeare's entire performative oeuvre from historical to tragic to comedic dramatic works provides the most remarkable and striking contrast to Christopher Marlowe's work, which nonetheless epitomizes the best of the English Renaissance revenge play. In some respects, it might be stated that Shakespeare is a magna cum laude graduate of the Universal School of World Dramatic Texts, while Christopher Marlowe is a summa cum laude graduate of Great Britain's School of Drama!

I think Shakespeare defies space and time. He is a suitable for topics of analysis anytime anyplace. Only this explains why his work can be accessed by whatever theory proposed!

Jinan F. B. Al-Hajaj Hello and thank you so much. I definitely agree with you. Indeed I have recently read one article going exactly in the same sense of your insightful idea of comparison between the dumb show and silent cinema. The idea of theatrics is also very interesting.

Dear Muhammad,

Good luck with your research. I recommend the following.

Best wishes,

Murat Öğütcü

When I read you question, some terms and expressions have captured my attention: metaphor, play itself, behavior and decision-making choices, and how it can be used as example in modern ethic behavior. I did something similar for my MA. Regarding Qualitative Analysis, it could be useful to think about content analysis or thematic analysis (it depends on the focus that you want to adopt). I would also suggest to consider the field of corpus linguistics approaches. In particular, to study metaphor you could read the subsection Metaphor (pp. 166-173) in the book Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis (chapter 7 Beyond Collocation).

Here, the link to the publisher's website of the book:

I think that work from The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) at Lancaster University can be quite inspiring (e.g., Elena Semino's works on metaphors and there are also professors interested in the analysis of Shakespeare).

Thank you

The definition of Plagiarism is: "Copy an idea or a literary, artistic or scientific work of another author, presenting it as if it were their own".

With the advance of communications, including the Internet, the editorial teams of the various journals and serious publishing houses, it becomes more difficult to fall into plagiarism. However this happens.

For me, Shakespeare's world did not inhabit any such bias, he dealt with specific social, human, interpersonal and personal problems and these loomed large; their outworking in his works was also complex. In most of his works, it was clear that men and women were villains, and he so depicted them, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra etc. The biases in his works were the social biases of his day and his portrayals particularly because they were based mainly on the ruling elite's life conflicts depicted the social order and cultural environment of his time as they were. He queried a few hegemonies though (The Tempest). He was not a utopian artist and as such grounded his works on the existent social relations of his day.

On the East coast there was certainly urban development although Zimbabwe, an important city, was not built until about the 14th century. But in truth, archaeology is lacking for many parts of sub-Saharan Africa as nobody has expected or expects anything. Mali of course was then a rich and influential state. Famously, the Moors arrived in Spain from Morocco and other parts of Northern Africa and built one of the outstanding civilisations of the time.

It depends what you are translating, With poetry, you have to know the versification method of the language and find a way to capture it in a language which does not sound the same or have the same methods (say pitch versus not using pitch). You also have to be careful with idioms. In French, as I found out delightfully, saying je suis chaud is not the same as saying j'ai chaud. Scansion is another ball game. Linguistics gets scansion wrong. It is a way of putting syllables together to sound a certain way; that is, it is determined more by the ear than by actual syllabification -- that is why variants in feet and measures occur. It was also meant to be memorable, that is, repetition helps one to remember. Not only do you need to look at classical rhetoric, rather than modern rhetoric, for what you need to remember (gesture, tone, etc.) and try to find ways of conveying these -- I always thought that the greatest poets in English were the great musical lyricists of the 20th century. To me "Another Hundred People Just Got Off Of The Train" by Sondheim is more effective than "The Wasteland" in its articulation. Also about classical rhetoric, when you read a Restoration comedy silently, it is not funny. When you read it aloud or see it acted, it is hilarious. The words were put together to be said aloud and you miss the fun if you do not hear them as the battle of wits they are.

These are just some thoughts to consider. As a practicing verse writer (I do not like what the word poet, which in Greek meant "maker", has become because maker means a person who is technically proficient), I did a preliminary study for a work on versification based not on linguistics or theory but on the ear ... as it would have been done in say Classical Greece and Rome and Ancient Israel. Having studied all three language as much as I could since a good classical education was no longer available in schools, and having read people like the Parry's and Albert Lord, as well as learned the chanting system in Hebrew, I found that looking at versification as a patterning of sound to organize effective statement to remember opened up a way to understand why certain writers are more effective than others.

Yes, it is, German.To look more deeply into such matters.

True, Dr. Cavallari. All the play stripts and story extracts I've ever read on The Tempest only states the speech lines and no narrative description of the scene. It is why had the question in the first place.

We have a collection of Indian adaptations of Shakespeare at the open access MIT Global Shakespeares digital video archive: http://globalshakespeares.org/

Many thanks to both of you, and apologies to Hugh for my not noticing his post earlier. So the context really is a full-blown political one (and not just a matter of political traditions but of a really perceived threat), without any dark hints of ecclesiastical undercurrents. That's very useful to know, if only as an elimination of possibilities. Chris.

When I saw a production of The Merchant last summer, I was struck by the way in which the play showed Shylock as beset upon by the Christian "good guys" in the most ruthless and despicable manner.   In effect, Antonio, Bassanio and Gratiano toss all sorts of vituperation and invective upon him, with some spitting and cursing involved, and this passes as "normal."  More to the point, the poor guy has to bear the thought of "losing" his daughter to the Christian rogue who steals her away, and in the end he forfeits not only his bond but half his wealth to Antonio.  Perhaps something like Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "positionality" is applicable to this situation, in which the Jew in Venetian society is relegated not only to the role of the moneylender but also to that of the miscreant-scapegoat of a Christian-dominated community--and the part becomes ego-syntonic with him.  Of course usury and capital weave their own logic in this social field. The play invites us to sympathize with the Semitic outsider while at the same time deploring the racist antics of the Christian characters, and hopefully the reader or spectator arrives at a point where the transvaluation of dehumanizing perspectives negates and supersedes both.

Dear Kyle,

I am an active prison researcher and as such I strongly advise you not to develop your own model of change especially if your funders are interested in the effect of your work in recidivism. There is a host of literature on recidivism after correctional treatment, but the most promising avenues at the moment are the Risk-Needs-Responsivity Model by Don A. Andrews, James Bonta and others and the Good Lives Model developed by Tony Ward. There is a nice little book that summarises both models (but prefers the Good Lives Model) by Tony Ward and Shadd Maruna, 'Rehabilitation', and tries to combine them.

As you'll not get recidivism data on the participants of your production (because they are still locked up), you should focus on the possible impact of your project on factors that have been identified in the work on the two models as having an impact on relapse. Considering that the US prison system is still rather geared towards risk, you should try to use something from the RNR model. You will be more successful with the GLM, though, because this is based on assumptions of positive psychology and thus e.g. considers creativity and experiences of mastery in work and play (aka self-efficacy) as important.

With regard to data collection methods, I don't feel the need to add much to the other answers except for the idea that the problem of your respondents "lying" for a nicer self representation is probably not that big. The problem is more on the side of social desirability because they probably like you and your colleagues. Anyway, as desistance from crime also has a lot to do with the way a (former) criminal sees him/herself and talks about him/herself (see Shadd Maruna: Making Good - How ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives), the problem is not so much if the self representation is too positive, but rather if the person conveys a sense of agency and realistic prospects of the future (even if the plans are positive), which in the prison context usually mean that plans should be rather humble.

I strongly support the preceding answer. I think Calderwood has a few  more interesting books on Shakespearean metadrama (1979 on the Henriad, 1983 on Hamlet).

Thank you Harith for your help. Of course, I will read it and enjoy it.

Hi. What an author wants to say in a work is secondary to what he really says. A work is a product of the ideology of the moment that it was produced, taking ideology as meant in social sciences. A great work can be approached from different angles and different critical theories. I would suggest Terry Eagleton's Criticism and ideology (2006); for a semiotic approach you could use A.J. Greimas, On Meaning: selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Although these works are narrative oriented you can extrapolate them to drama with success. For more theoretical analysis you can consult Raman Selden, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, plus the latest edition of Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide.

The witches prophesied for both Banquo and Macbeth. But they both react in two different ways to the prophecy of the witches. Banquo who represents the reason and logic hears them but takes no necessary step in this regard as he is well aware of the deceiving nature of these evil sisters. On the other hand Macbeth's ambitious mind finds a way out to fulfill their prophecy. At the beginning he needs a push from his wife but later on he himself is sufficient to remove all the obstacles from his path.