Shakespeare's God

2005

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Author: Ivor Morris
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415353243
Category : Christian drama, English
Languages : en
Pages : 504

First published in 1972. Shakespeare's God investigates whether a religious interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedies is possible. The study places Christianity's commentary on the human condition side by side with what tragedy reveals about it. This pattern is identified using the writings of Christian thinkers from Augustine to the present day. The pattern in the chief phenomena of literary tragedy is also traced

Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments

2011-03-01

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Author: Robert G. Hunter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820338540
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Robert G. Hunter maintains that the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Elizabethan mind was in great part responsible for the emergence of the outstanding tragedies of the age. Luther and Calvin caused men to ask how God can be just if man is not free, and Shakespeare's greatest tragedies confront the vexing problems posed by these altered conceptions of man's freedom of will and God's providential control of natural circumstance. Shakespeare's audiences were not single-minded. He wrote for semi-Pelagians, Augustinians, Calvinists, and men and women who did not know what to think. Confl icting certainties, doubts, and uncertainties were his raw material, both within his mind and the minds of the audience. Hunter shows how Shakespeare uses the major attitudes toward God's judgment in creating Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. He notes that Shakespeare's different viewpoints are the heart of the tragedies themselves. Even after Shakespeare's imaginative considerations of the mysteries, the tragedies seem to consistently provide questions rather than answers, and what they inspire in their beholders is more likely to be doubt than faith.

A Will to Believe

2014-01-16

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Author: David Scott Kastan
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191004294
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 168

On 19 December 1601, John Croke, then Speaker of the House of Commons, addressed his colleagues: "If a question should be asked, What is the first and chief thing in a Commonwealth to be regarded? I should say, religion. If, What is the second? I should say, religion. If, What the third? I should still say, religion." But if religion was recognized as the "chief thing in a Commonwealth," we have been less certain what it does in Shakespeare's plays. Written and performed in a culture in which religion was indeed inescapable, the plays have usually been seen either as evidence of Shakespeare's own disinterested secularism or, more recently, as coded signposts to his own sectarian commitments. Based upon the inaugural series of the Oxford-Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2008, A Will to Believe offers a thoughtful, surprising, and often moving consideration of how religion actually functions in them: not as keys to Shakespeare's own faith but as remarkably sensitive registers of the various ways in which religion charged the world in which he lived. The book shows what we know and can't know about Shakespeare's own beliefs, and demonstrates, in a series of wonderfully alert and agile readings, how the often fraught and vertiginous religious environment of Post-Reformation England gets refracted by the lens of Shakespeare's imagination.

The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles

2007-01-15

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Author: Loren J. Samons II
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826697
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 25

Mid-fifth-century Athens saw the development of the Athenian empire, the radicalization of Athenian democracy through the empowerment of poorer citizens, the adornment of the city through a massive and expensive building program, the classical age of Athenian tragedy, the assembly of intellectuals offering novel approaches to philosophical and scientific issues, and the end of the Spartan-Athenian alliance against Persia and the beginning of open hostilities between the two greatest powers of ancient Greece. The Athenian statesman Pericles both fostered and supported many of these developments. Although it is no longer fashionable to view Periclean Athens as a social or cultural paradigm, study of the history, society, art, and literature of mid-fifth-century Athens remains central to any understanding of Greek history. This collection of essays reveal the political, religious, economic, social, artistic, literary, intellectual, and military infrastructure that made the Age of Pericles possible.

Shakespeare and the Bible

2000

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Author: Steven Marx
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198184409
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide tofurther reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. Despite the presence of hundreds of Biblical allusions in Shakespeare, this is the first book to explore the pattern and significance of those references in relation to a selection of his greatest plays. It reveals the Bible as a rich source for Shakespeare's uses of myth, history, comedy andtragedy, his techniques of staging, and his ways of characterizing rulers, magicians and teachers in the image of the Bible's multifaceted God. This book also discloses ways in which Shakespeare's plays offer both pious and irreverent interpretations of the Scriptures comparable to those presentedby his contemporary writers, artists, philosophers and politicians. After an opening chapter comparing the Bible as a fragmented yet unified collection of 46 books with the fragmented yet unified First Folio collection of Shakespeare's 36 plays, each of the following six chapters matches a book of the Bible with a representative play: the creation myth of Genesiswith the first play in the Folio, The Tempest, the historical epic of Exodus with Henry V, the tragedy of Job with King Lear, the tragicomedy of the Gospel of Matthew with Measure for Measure, the homiletic disputation of Paul's Epistle to the Romans with The Merchant of Venice, and the apocalypticmasque of the Book of Revelation with The Tempest again. Though its subject matter and style appeal to a broad audience, this book is grounded in recent scholarship in Shakespeare and Biblical studies. Its intertextual readings are framed by descriptions of the historical circumstances of each work's composition and reception and by an emergent theory ofallusion as a principle of creation and understanding.

Shakespeare and Jung - the God in Time

2019

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Author: James Driscoll
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781680534818
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

In Shakespeare and Jung - The God in Time literary critic and philosopher James Driscoll presents original arguments for the existence and nature of God. He traverses the boundaries of art, philosophy, psychology, and religion to draw on Shakespeare, Carl Jung, and A. N. Whitehead to define and illuminate the interconnections of God and time. Time's irreversibility and continuous creation of novelty makes it the medium and engine of order, value, and meaning. Time connects and differentiates all, thereby making reality relational and allowing for feeling, thought, art, and science. Shakespeare, the writer with the greatest insight into human nature, dramatized the primacy of time in our lives. Time is the de facto God of Shakespeare's worlds. Shakespeare anticipated our own age when time began to displace eternity as the ground of reality. Jung gave us a new map of the psyche and terminology to explore more deeply the human condition, bound as it is in time, and the nature of deity. Driscoll carries Jung's insights further into the three paradigmatic revelations of the Western Godhead: The Book of Job, the Gospels, and Shakespeare's King Lear. Shakespeare the artist grasped the dynamics of the Western Godhead giving us a singular revelation of its dominant archetypes, Yahweh, Job, Prometheus, and Christ. The archetypes of the Western Godhead shaped the development of art, science, and technology and energized the ideals of progress and freedom. The West advanced rapidly in science, the arts, and human rights because of the unique archetypal dynamics of its God in Time.

The Faith of William Shakespeare

2016-11-18

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Author: Graham Holderness
Publisher: Lion Books
ISBN: 0745968929
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

William Shakespeare stills stands head and shoulders above any other author in the English language, a position that is unlikely ever to change. Yet it is often said that we know very little about him - and that applies as much to what he believed as it does to the rest of his biography. Or does it? In this authoritative new study, Graham Holderness takes us through the context of Shakespeare's life, times of religious and political turmoil, and looks at what we do know of Shakespeare the Anglican. But then he goes beyond that, and mines the plays themselves, not just for the words of the characters, but for the concepts, themes and language which Shakespeare was himself steeped in - the language of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Considering particularly such plays as Richard ll, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, Holderness shows how the ideas of Catholicism come up against those of Luther and Calvin; how Christianity was woven deep into Shakespeare's psyche, and how he brought it again and again to his art.

Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays

2011-09-16

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Author: Naseeb Shaheen
Publisher: University of Delaware
ISBN: 1611493730
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 982

The hundreds of biblical references in Shakespeare's plays give ample evidence that he was well acquainted with Scripture. Not only is the range of his biblical references impressive, but also the aptness with which he makes them. Hamlet and Othello each have more than fifty biblical references. No study of Shakespeare's plays is complete that ignores Shakespeare's use of scripture. The Bibles that Shakespeare knew, however, were not those that are in use today. By the time the King James Bible appeared in 1611, Shakespeare's career was all but over, and the Anglican liturgy that is evident in his plays is likewise one that few persons are acquainted with. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of the English Bibles of Shakespeare's day, notes their similarities and differences, and indicates which version the playwright knew best. The thorny question of what constitutes a valid biblical reference is also discussed. The study of Shakespeare's biblical references is not based on secondary sources. The author owned one of the world's largest collections of early English bibles, including over one hundred copies of the Geneva bible and numerous editions of other Bibles, prayer books, and books of homilies of Shakespeare's day. To be of real worth, a study of Shakespeare's biblical references should also enable the reader to determine which references Shakespeare borrowed from his plot sources and which he added from his own memory as part of his design for the play. The author studies every source that Shakespeare is known to have read or consulted before writing each play and has examined the biblical references in those sources. Shaheen then points out which biblical references in his literary sources Shakespeare accepted, and how he adapted them in his plays. This information is especially valuable when assessing the theological meanings that are sometimes imposed on his plays, meanings that often go beyond what Shakespeare intended or what his audience must have understood. Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays is considerably broader in scope than any other study of its kind and provides the scholarly checks and balances in dealing with the subject that previous studies lacked. .

The Bible in Shakespeare

2013-08-29

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Author: Hannibal Hamlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199677611
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 397

"This book is about allusions to the Bible in Shakespeare's plays. It argues that such allusions are frequent, deliberate, and significant, and that the study of these allusions is repaid by a deeper understanding of the plays." - Introduction.

The God Within. The Mystery of the Divine in Shakespeare's Plays

2015-12-28

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Author: Austin Gragg
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668116636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 16

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: In the works of William Shakespeare there is often times an air of mystery often equated to forces of occult powers. It is my belief that the mystery conveyed through his plays is not mere tricks to entice an audience. Rather his methods involved a comprehensive understanding not only of human nature, but also of forces of higher powers. These powers are often talked about in religious studies and would have been known to most as “God”. So for the purpose of this essay we will think of God as a force rather than a being, a total and comprehensive all pervasive weaving in the fabric of time. To the person uneducated in the occult powers, it is easy to see the outrageous pieces of his art as magic. Which is like the ultimate cop out, just throwing away its value and meaning to the wind. To read Shakespeare is to feel Shakespeare, not some rational understanding. To read Shakespeare is to transport from the ephemeral material world to the eternal realm of spiritual eternity. The sense that this brings to mind is where the aesthetic pleasure of reading Shakespeare envelops the world. It is why we are still reading Shakespeare today and will continue to do so for quite some time. But to know time is to exist on a different plane than Shakespeare inhabited. For Shakespeare’s world was that of the eternal due to a super conscious understanding of the Divine. More than likely these forces were working through him because he had found a way to open himself up to the muses in order to become a muse himself. In other words we are mere fools in time and Shakespeare suffered greatly to give the world a piece of himself.