Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Plays & playwrights > 16th to 18th centuries > Shakespeare studies & criticism
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Shakespeare's Alternative Tales (Paperback)
Loot Price: R943
Discovery Miles 9 430
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Shakespeare's Alternative Tales (Paperback)
Series: Longman Medieval and Renaissance Library
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Total price: R953
Discovery Miles: 9 530
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A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which
Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for
the understanding of his work. In re-telling a particular story, a
Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the
narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier
writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon
which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as
innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them
considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern
spectator but an essential component, for a contemporary audience,
of the meaning of the work. Shakespeare's Alternative Tales
explores this literary dialogue, focusing on those plays in which
the expectations generated by an inherited story are in some way
overthrown, setting up a tension for a Renaissance spectator
between 'received' and 'alternative' readings of the text. Each
chapter opens with a familiar story, supplying a context for the
subsequent discussion, and exhibits the way in which the
dramatist's reworking of a traditional motif interrogates the
assumptions implicit in his source. While offering the
twentieth-century reader a fresh perspective from which to view the
plays, the approach also supplies an introduction to contemporary
readings of the Shakespearean canon. The tales Leah Scragg
considers may be seen as 'alternative' in more than one sense: they
radically rework conventional situations, while lending themselves
to analysis in terms of new critical methodologies. The text will
be of interest to both students of Shakespeare and the general
reader. In conjunction with the author's companion volume,
Shakespeare's Mouldy Tales, it provides an ideal introduction to
contemporary developments in source studies.
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