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Follows the treatment of repentance in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest to show the relationship of theme and form, and the dramatist's experimentation with forms until he accomplished his goal--the probing psychological exploration of men who sin, repent, and achieve redemption.
Explores and reexamines Shakespeare's theology from the standpoint of revisionist history of the English Reformation.
Shakespeare lived at a time when England was undergoing the revolution in ritual theory and practice we know as the English Reformation. With it came an unprecedented transformation in the language of religious life. Whereas priests had once acted as mediators between God and men through sacramental rites, Reformed theology declared the priesthood of all believers. What ensued was not the tidy replacement of one doctrine by another but a long and messy conversation about the conventions of religious life and practice. In this brilliant and strikingly original book, Sarah Beckwith traces the fortunes of this conversation in Shakespeare’s theater. Beckwith focuses on the sacrament of penance, which in the Middle Ages stood as the very basis of Christian community and human relations. With the elimination of this sacrament, the words of penance and repentance—"confess," "forgive," "absolve" —no longer meant (no longer could mean) what they once did. In tracing the changing speech patterns of confession and absolution, both in Shakespeare’s work and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture more broadly, Beckwith reveals Shakespeare’s profound understanding of the importance of language as the fragile basis of our relations with others. In particular, she shows that the post-tragic plays, especially Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, are explorations of the new regimes and communities of forgiveness. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell, Beckwith enables us to see these plays in an entirely new light, skillfully guiding us through some of the deepest questions that Shakespeare poses to his audiences.
Religious issues and discourse are key to an understanding of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This dictionary discusses over 1000 words and names in Shakespeare's works that have a religious connotation. Its unique word-by-word approach allows equal consideration of the full nuance of each of these words, from 'abbess' to 'zeal'. It also gradually reveals the persistence, the variety, and the sophistication of Shakespeare's religious usage. Frequent attention is given to the prominence of Reformation controversy in these words, and to Shakespeare's often ingenious and playful metaphoric usage of them. Theological commonplaces assume a major place in the dictionary, as do overt references to biblical figures, biblical stories and biblical place-names; biblical allusions; church figures and saints.
Over the last decade a number of prison theatre programs have developed to rehabilitate inmates by having them perform Shakespearean adaptations. This book focuses on how prison theatre today reveals certain elements of the early modern theatre that were themselves responses to cataclysmic changes in theological doctrine and religious practice.
The connection between Renaissance ideas about the character of individual nations and the presentation of stage characters of various nationalities in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is examined in this volume.
This book assesses William Shakespeare in the context of political and religious crisis, paying particular attention to his Catholic connections, which have heretofore been underplayed by much Protestant interpretation. Bourgeois Richmond's most important contribution is to study the genre of romance in its guise as a 'cover' for recusant Catholicism, drawing on a long tradition of medieval-religious plays devoted to the propagation of Catholic religious faith.
Originally published in 1989, this book focuses on the handling of the relationship between the onstage world and the offstage world, between the world that Shakespeare shows us and the one he tells us about. It is developed in two parts. Initially examined is the way reports are used in Shakespeare to relate the offstage and onstage worlds, building from simple examples within individual scenes in various plays to related sequences of reports which can be evaluated as part of broader strategies effecting the structure of a whole play. In the second part the author examines the ways in which several, or all, of these strategies work in individual plays, and what combined effect the prominent employment of them has in shaping the effect of the plays. In all cases the author is concerned to indicate why Shakespeare chose to handle matters as he does rather than in other ways available in the sources or in the speculative alternative methods which can be imaginatively constructed.
This cutting-edge book explores Shakespeare’s negotiation of Reformation controversy about theories of salvation. While twentieth century literary criticism tended to regard Shakespeare as a harbinger of secularism, the so-called “turn to religion” in early modern studies has given renewed attention to the religious elements in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, there remains an aura of uncertainty regarding some of the doctrinal and liturgical specificities of the period. This historical gap is especially felt with respect to theories of salvation, or soteriology. Such ambiguity, however, calls for further inquiry into historical theology. The author explores how the language and concepts of faith, grace, charity, the sacraments, election, free will, justification, sanctification, and atonement find expression in Shakespeare’s plays. In doing so, this book contributes to the recovery of a greater understanding of the relationship between early modern religion and Shakespearean drama. While the author shares David Scott Kastan’s reluctance to attribute particular religious convictions to Shakespeare, in some cases such critical guardedness has diverted attention from the religious topography of Shakespeare’s plays. Throughout this study, the author’s hermeneutic is to read Shakespeare through the lens of early modern theological controversy and to read early modern theology through the lens of Shakespeare.