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Shakespeare's The Tempest
In the 400 years since The Tempest was first staged, millions of words have been written about it. Critics, directors and actors have interpreted it in widely different ways and developed theories ranging from the more-or-less plausible to the eccentric and the completely outlandish. It is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, and as well as its bewitching music, its hallucinatory quality and its enchanted island setting, it contains some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful poetry and most famous lines. From Caliban’s “The isle is full of noises” to Prospero’s “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on”, The Tempest haunts our collective imagination. But what is it actua...
Shakespeare's Hamlet
In the four centuries since Shakespeare’s death in 1616, Hamlet has almost always been regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest play. This is not surprising. As Barbara Everett has observed, Hamlet was not only “the first great tragedy in Europe for two thousand years”; it was, and still is, “the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest”. The character of Hamlet utterly dominates the play he so reluctantly inhabits to a degree that is rivalled only by Prospero in The Tempest. Even when he isn’t on stage, speaking nearly 40% of the play’s text, the other characters are talking and worrying about him. This is the most obvious reason why Ha...
Misrepresentations
Just at the moment when conflicts between critical "isms" are threatening to turn the study of English literature into a game park for endangered texts, Bradshaw arrives with a work of liberating wit and insight. His subject is double: the Shakespeare he reads and the Shakespeare whom critics in the ranks of the new historicists and cultural materialists are representing (or misrepresenting).
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Conrad finished Heart of Darkness on 9th February, 1899 and on publication it had an impact as powerful as any long short story, or short novel ever written – it is only 38,000 words. It quickly became, and has remained, Conrad’s most famous work and has been regarded by many in America, if not elsewhere, as his greatest work. Exciting and profound, lucid and bewildering, and written with an exuberance which sometimes seems at odds with its subject matter, it has influenced writers as diverse as T.S.Eliot, Graham Greene, William Golding, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. It has also inspired, among others, Orson Welles, who made two radio versions the second of which, in 1945, depicted Kurtz as a...
Shakespeare's Macbeth
Macbeth may well be the most terrifying play in the English language, but it hasn’t always been seen that way. It has divided critics more deeply than any other Shakespearian tragedy – and the argument, in essence, has been about just how terrifying the play really is and about how we should react, or do react, to Macbeth himself. No Shakespearian tragedy gives as much attention to its hero as Macbeth. With the exception of Lady Macbeth, there is much less emphasis on the figures round the hero than there is in Hamlet or Othello. Unlike King Lear, with its parallel story of Gloucester and his sons, Macbeth has no sub-plot. And its imagery of sharp contrasts – of day and night, light an...
Shakespeare's Scepticism
"Shakespeare's Scepticism combines a powerfully original thesis about Shakespeare with unfailingly probing analyses of specific passages and plays. Graham Bradshaw's book will take its place beside those of his most distinguished forerunners--Bradley, Wilson Knight, Rossiter, Rabkin--as one of the landmarks of Shakespeare criticism in the twentieth century."--Peter L. Rudnytsky, Renaissance Quarterly
Shakespeare's Othello
With the exception of Hamlet, Othello is Shakespeare’s most controversial play. It is also his most shocking. Dr Johnson famously described the ending as “not to be endured”, and H.H. Furness, after editing the Variorum edition of the play, confessed to wishing that “this tragedy had never been written”. No play in performance has prompted more outbursts from onlookers: there are many recorded instances of members of the audience actually trying to intervene to prevent Othello murdering Desdemona. It is a more domestic tragedy than Hamlet, King Lear or Macbeth, and it is the intimacy of its subject matter which gives it its dramatic power. Othello is a faithful portrait of life, wr...
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is one of the most written-about novels in the English language. Famous for the dark and passionate world Emily Brontë creates, and for the doomed relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, it is a story which has almost become synonymous with romance, not just for Hollywood, chick lit writers and advertisers but for many who have read it and many more who haven’t. Countless stories, films, television adaptations and magazine articles owe their origins or inspiration to Brontë’s extraordinary story of love and death in the Yorkshire moors. Catherine’s desperate avowal – “Nelly, I am Heathcliff” – has been described as the most romantic sentence ...
Humanities Research Centre
A history of the HRC at the ANU, but also an examination of the role and predicament of the humanities within universities and the wider community, and contributes substantially to the ongoing debate on an Australian identity.
Shakespeare in Japan
Since the late Meiji period, Shakespeare has held a central place in Japanese literary culture. This work considers the cultural and linguistic problems of translation and includes an illustrated survey of the most significant Shakespearean productions and adaptations, and the contrasting responses of Japanese and Western critics.
