William Shakespeare
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
William Shakespeare
（Rereading literature / general editor, Terry Eagleton）
B. Blackwell, 1986
- : hard
- : pbk
Available at 78 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This is a bold and original reinterpretation of almost all of Shakespeare's major plays, in the light of the Marxist, feminist and semiotic ideas of our own time. Through a set of tenaciously detailed readings, the book illuminates a number of persistent problems or conflicts in Shakespearean drama - in particular a contradiction between words and things, body and language, which is also explored in terms of law, sexuality and Nature.
Language and desire, Terry Eagleton argues, are seen by Shakespeare as a kind of 'surplus' over and above the body, stable and social roles and a fixed human nature. But the attitude of the plays to such a 'surplus' is profoundly ambivalent; if they admire it as the very source of human creativity, they also fear its anarchic, trangressive force. Underlying such ambiguities, the book convincingly shows, is a deeper ideological struggle, between feudalist traditionalism on the one hand, and the emergence of new forms of bourgeois individualism on the other. This book revels how, in the light of our own contemporary theories of language, sexuality and society, we can understand the issues present in Shakespeare's drama which previously have remained obscure.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
1 Language: Macbeth, Richard II, Henry IV 1
2 Desire: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night 18
3 Law: The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida 35
4 'Nothing': Othello, Hamlet, Coriolanus 64
5 Value: King Lear, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra 76
6 Nature: As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest 90
Conclusion 97
Notes 105
Index 109
by "Nielsen BookData"