Psychoanalysis is concerned with the vicissitudes of life: loss, grief, mourning, guilt, and also with reparation and creativity, with death and rebirth--as is the work of Shakespeare. In today's world we are moved by Shakespeare's plays because these themes are brought to life with a richness and creativity that has not dimmed with the passing of time.
Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged. In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited.
In a magnificent feat of re-creating sixteenth-century London and Stratford, bestselling biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd brings William Shakespeare to life in the manner of a contemporary rather than a biographer. Following his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement with this definitive and imaginative biographical masterpiece.
Shakespeare lived in a world of absolutes—of claims for the absolute authority of scripture, monarch, and God, and the authority of fathers over wives and children, the old over the young, and the gentle over the baseborn. With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers.
Re-Humanising Shakespeare - Literary Humanism, Wisdom And Modernity
Can Shakespeare help us with the question of how to live? Surely modern scepticism has put paid to the faith in the universally valid wisdom of sages? Re-Humanising Shakespeare provocatively argues that although Shakespeare himself contributed to the foundationless world of modernity, his work can still serve as a source of existential wisdom and guidance.
