Shakespeare And The Nature Of Love

The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare’s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about love, biology, and culture raised by his method, Nordlund considers four specific forms of love in seven of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the vicissitudes of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, he argues that Shakespeare makes a sustained inquiry into the impact of culture and society upon the natural human affections. King Lear offers insight into the conflicted relationship between love and duty. In two problem plays about romantic love, Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well, the tension between individual idiosyncrasies and social consensus becomes especially salient. And finally, in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, Nordlund asks what Shakespeare can tell us about the dark avatar of jealousy.

The best conception of love, Marcus Nordlund contends, and hence the best framework for its literary analysis, must be a fusion of evolutionary, cultural, and historical explanation. It is within just such a bio-cultural nexus that Nordlund explores Shakespeare’s treatment of different forms of love. His approach leads to a valuable new perspective on Shakespearean love and, more broadly, on the interaction between our common humanity and our historical contingency as they are reflected, recast, transformed, or even suppressed in literary works. After addressing critical issues about love, biology, and culture raised by his method, Nordlund considers four specific forms of love in seven of Shakespeare’s plays. Examining the vicissitudes of parental love in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, he argues that Shakespeare makes a sustained inquiry into the impact of culture and society upon the natural human affections. King Lear offers insight into the conflicted relationship between love and duty. In two problem plays about romantic love, Troilus and Cressida and All’s Well that Ends Well, the tension between individual idiosyncrasies and social consensus becomes especially salient. And finally, in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, Nordlund asks what Shakespeare can tell us about the dark avatar of jealousy.

Are you curious about why Shakespeare's plays have captured hearts and minds for the past 425 years but are too intimidated by his reputation or the difficulty of his language to explore the plays on your own? If so, this is the book for you because, while it takes an in-depth look at ten major plays, it seeks to make each one understandable and, through that, to clarify why their author still remains beloved by so many. Beginning with the early Romeo and Juliet and ending with the late The Tempest, it shows how Shakespeare gradually develops a vision of human relationships that is highly moral and, at the same time, deeply humane. Love is a unifying theme of these works, and women often serve to illuminate its crucial importance for the development of a fully human existence. Genuine love, the plays suggest, requires a disciplined selflessness that relinquishes personal desire but which is then providentially rewarded with nature's abundance. Such love begets more love. This is a choice that not everyone is willing to make, but the decision is one, the plays argue, that has profound consequences for the individual, for families, and for society itself. Based on the texts of each play and supported by relevant historical and critical commentary from other respected critics, this is the kind of analysis that will enrich your understanding and appreciation of this supremely gifted author. If you want to peer into the remarkable soul of Shakespeare's art, this is a book that gets to the very heart of these 10 major plays and the author who wrote them.

Comprehensive study of the concept of love in Shakespeare's work, exploring historical contexts, theory and philosophy of love.

In particular, we see the full variety of erotic connections, from the "star-crossed" devotions of Romeo and Juliet to the failed romance of Troilus and Cressida to the problematic friendship of Falstaff and Hal.".

Shakespeare Studies is an international volume published every year in hard cover that contains essays and studies by scholars and cultural historians from both hemispheres. Although the journal maintains a focus on the theatrical milieu of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it is also concerned with Britain's intellectual and cultural connections to the continent, its sociopolitical history, and its place in the emerging globalism of the period. The journal also includes substantial reviews of significant publications dealing with these issues, as well as theoretical studies relevant to scholars of early modern culture. This issue features another Forum, entitled "The Universities and the Theater." Organized and introduced by John H. Astington, the Forum includes commentary considering the relationship between theater in the universities and the Renaissance public stage. Volume XXXVII also features articles on the Fortune contract, and Titus Andronicus and the New World, as well as a review article on women and the early modern stage. There are nineteen reviews in this volume on such varying topics as angels in the early modern world, Shakespeare and the nature of love, and Shakespeare in French theory. Susan Zimmerman is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Garrett Sullivan is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Lucretius and Shakespeare on the Nature of Things maps large, new vistas for understanding the relationship between De rerum natura and Shakespeare’s works. In chapters on six important plays across the canon (King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), it demonstrates that Shakespeare articulates his erotics of being, his “great creating nature” (The Winter’s Tale), by drawing on imagery he learned from Ovid and other classical poets, but especially from Lucretius, in his powerful epic that celebrates Venus and her endless creativity. Responding to Lucretius’s widely admired Latinity in his exposition of the life of man in nature, Shakespeare emerges as an early modern materialist who writes poetry that is effectively “atomic,” marked (as we might say today) by fission (hendiadys, for example) and fusion (synoeciosis, for example), joining and splitting, splitting and joining language and character as no other poet has ever done – To give away yourself keeps yourself still; My grave is like to be my wedding bed; I begin/To doubt the equivocation of the fiend/That lies like truth. Readers of Shoaf’s book will encounter anew, through both fresh evidence and close reading, Shakespeare’s universally acknowledged commitment to the art of nature and the nature of art. With Lucretius’s poetry as inspiration, Shakespeare becomes the poet of the material, both in art and in nature, immensely creative with his dædala lingua like dædala natura – his wonder-crafting tongue like wonder-working nature.