Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This ground-breaking study reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision at the heart of Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges. Through compelling new readings of the plays, couched in lively, accessible prose and grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan transforms our understanding of Shakespearean tragedy by revealing the radical egalitarian perspective from which it is conceived and written. In recent decades criticism has striven to entrench these plays in the culture of the distant past from which they sprang. This book frees them to show how Shakespeare dramatises the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits.
Synopsis
This ground-breaking book reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision that drives Shakespeare's tragedies, tracing its unbroken development from its beginnings in the Henry VI plays and Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, right through to his last, Coriolanus. The four full-length studies at the heart of the book focus in depth on Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, but with the same unmistakably Shakespearean tragic vision at its core. Through compelling new readings of the plays, grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan shows how Shakespeare dramatizes the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits.