Download Free The Shakespearean Ethic Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Shakespearean Ethic and write the review.

With modesty and conviction, this edition offers a viewpoint seldomly considered: an unusual and exceptionally clear insight into Shakespeare’s philosophy. Appreciating the danger Shakespeare faced in writing at a time of major religious intolerance, this fresh examination demonstrates how subtly his plays allegorically explore aspects of the perennial philosophy. In doing so, it argues, Shakespeare raises the fundamental question of ethics. Both thought provoking and persuasive, this book also contrasts Hamlet with Measure for Measure and Othello with The Winter’s Tale in order to expose the dilemmas that confront its heroes.
'More perceptive and convincing than a great deal that has ever been written on the subject 'close and attentive scholarship 'shrewd and ingenious observations.' A.L. Rowse, Daily Telegraph'Original and stimulating, Mr Vyvyan's thesis is important and serious: serious in the sense that his reading of the plays and his supporting reading into Shakespeare's climate of ideas is deep, connected and wide.' Times Literary Supplement'Two important insights bind together the central argument of this book ... Firstly, and most importantly, the author tells us that in Shakespeare "everything happens.
Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics examines representations of moral choice in Shakespeare's plays, focusing on intellectual history, Montaigne, and Christian ethics.
Looking at some of the Shakespearean comedies, author John Vyvyan suggests they express a consistent, profoundly Christian philosophy of life based on the Platonic ideas of beauty and love. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and All’s Well That Ends Well, the heroines bring to life the idea of love as the force that is awakened in the world by beauty which then leads the soul to perfection. Vyvyan believes that for Shakespeare, love was preeminent over human ideas of justice, that self-discovery was a supreme human experience, and that breaking faith with the ideal—as Agamemnon, Cressida, and Hector all do in Troilus and Cressida —sowed the seeds of tragedy. The author’s recognition of Shakespeare's use of allegory enables him to make sense of certain developments in these plays that seem weak or absurd from the psychological standpoint. He does not suggest that Shakespeare’s philosophy is the most important thing about his plays; it is simply one thing about them that ought to be known. The recognition of this philosophy enhances enjoyment of the plays, giving them a new dimension and richness. This edition contains a list of the author’s Shakespearean references and an enhanced index.
Originally published by Chatto & Windus in 1960 as the second volume in a trilogy, this book has long been out of print. It offers a viewpoint seldom considered: an unusual and exceptionally clear insight into Shakespeare's philosophy. It does so with freshness, modesty and conviction. John Vyvyan continues his exploration into Shakespeare's philosophy, begun in The Shakespearean Ethic, which he believes to have been consistent, consciously held and profoundly Christian. However, appreciating the danger faced in writing at a time of major religious intolerance, for 'by the orthodox standards of his age, [such a] philosophy was heretical', Vyvyan explains how Shakespeare used the medieval allegory of love, The Romance of the Rose, to veil his ideas. The ultimate principle of his unorthodoxy, Vyvyan points out, was not original. It was one that had 'been getting the mystics into trouble repeatedly since the early Middle Ages. Shakespeare's view, that love leads to the recognition of unity, in essence is a poet's presentation of the doctrine of divine immanence. This is something the mystics are continually reasserting'. In The Romance of the Rose, the heroine symbolises the highest form of Love, not just romance, but also the qualities of purity and constancy, as Vyvyan reveals by discussing at length Love's Labour's Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. He shows that, even in his earliest work, Shakespeare was moving towards the universal ideas of love, forgiveness and regeneration which found their fullest expression in The Tempest and A Winter's Tale. 'There is no other voice from the past', Vyvyan writes, 'to which we still listen so willingly; and this is not merely because he entertains us, even in the higher sense, but also because there is something in his outlook on life that is deeply satisfying.' Author Details: John Vyvyan, born in 1908 in Sussex, was educated mainly in Switzerland. His first profession was archaeology, and he worked with Sir Flinders Petrie in the Middle East. Illness, which dogged him all his life, ended this kind of arduous field work, and he retired from archaeology to become a Shakespearean scholar and to write. In recognition of his contribution to Shakespearean scholarship in his trilogy, The Shakespearean Ethic (1959), Shakespeare and the Rose of Love (1960) and Shakespeare and Platonic Beauty (1961), he was offered, but unable to take up, a visiting lectureship at the State University of New York. He died in Exmouth in 1975.
Virtue, as a Renaissance ideal, was largely conceived as a rational governing of unruly passions. Revising this early modern commonplace, this study shows how Shakespeare dramatizes a discerning Aristotelian conception of virtue as a touchstone of excellence: executing just action at the best time, in the best way, and for the best end within the contingent world. Not only situational, Aristotelian virtue is, moreover, integrative, harmonizing passion and reason, will and understanding, towards personal and civil good. Yet as a surprising backfire on the misogynist streak in Aristotle, the resistant female characters in Shakespeare emerge as the exemplars of ethical action, appropriating traditionally male-inflected virtue. At the junction of ethical, psycho-physiological, cultural and gender studies, this approach of prudential psychology bridges an apparent but needless divergence of critical focus between affect and cognition, ethics and prudential action. Firmly situated in new historicist practices, prudential psychology goes beyond narrow discourses of power into the all-encompassing arena of virtue as the complete life, which recommends an interdisciplinary approach for a fuller understanding of Shakespeare's works.
Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics examines representations of moral choice in Shakespeare's plays, focusing on intellectual history, Montaigne, and Christian ethics.