Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition: A Reading of Five Problem PlaysThis 1996 book offers an original approach to Shakespeare's so-called 'problem plays' by contending that they can be viewed as experiments in the Mannerist style. The plays reappraised here are Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. How can a term used to define a movement in art history be made relevant to theatrical analysis? Maquerlot shows how famous painters of sixteenth-century Italy cultivated structural ambiguity or dissonance in reaction to the classical canons of the High Renaissance. Close readings of Shakespeare's plays, from the period 1599 to 1604, reveal intriguing analogies with Mannerist art and the dramatist's response to Elizabethan formalism. Maquerlot concludes by examining Othello, which marks the end of Shakespeare's Mannerist experiments, and the less equivocal use of artifice in his late romances. |
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Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition: A Reading of Five Problem Plays Jean-Pierre Maquerlot No preview available - 2005 |
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Achilles action All's Angelo appears artifice artists audience become body Brutus Caesar calls cause characters Claudius comedy comes conventions critical death desire doubt dramatic Duke effect Elizabethan episodes evil example experience expression eyes face fact feeling figures final formalism give given Hamlet hand Helena High holds human idea Italy Julius Caesar King Laertes later less lines look madness maniera Mannerism Mannerist means Measure for Measure method mind moral murder nature never object once Othello painting perhaps perspective plate play plot position present Providence question reason reference Renaissance revenge rhetoric role scene seems seen sense Shakespeare situation space speak speech stage stand story structure style suggests theatre theatrical things thought tion tragedy Troilus and Cressida true turn Ulysses Venice
Bibliographic information
| Title | Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition: A Reading of Five Problem Plays |
| Author | Jean-Pierre Maquerlot |
| Editor | University of Cambridge |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, 1995 |
| ISBN | 0521410835, 9780521410830 |
| Length | 197 pages |
| Subjects | › › Drama / Shakespeare Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Literary Criticism / Shakespeare |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |