Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
Critical Approaches to Shakespeare’s Plays
Gopa B. Caesar:
i. Historicism
Literature is a mode of discourse, a form of representation intimately connected to the expression of and struggle for power.
Typically, a New Historical essay begins with an historical anecdote and then establishes connections with certain features of a literary work, as when Stephen Greenblatt compares recording Indian words in the New World to the containment of what might seem to be subversive comments in 1 Henry IV.
King Lear is a play about rebellion against a kign that hinges on a denial of hospitality.
King James did not like the duties of office. He favored plain speech. He believed in the divine right of kings.
Gopa B. Caesar:
j. Ethnic, Post-Colonial, and International Studies
Akira Kurosawa, the great Japanese director, retold the story of King Lear in Ran.
But Japanese culture could not conceive of man paying any attention to daughters; the hero of the story has two sons, not three daughters.
Harold Bloom finds the result a strong reading, pure Kurosawa and excellent Shakepeare.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Critical Approaches: the counter-arguments
Bloom calls the approaches products of the School of Resentment.
Great literature is about re-reading, not life.
Key research tool is a good dictionary.
Continued need for close reading that seeks to connect the themes and elements of a work. That connection is the meaning or purpose or end or “final cause†of the work.
The canon is not constructed by today’s local concerns: if the purpose of literature is to open up other worlds, what could be more constricting or instulting than to offer each ethnic group only its own small corpus?
Gopa B. Caesar:
Conclusion
If you don’t like a classic, consider that you may be the one with limited vision, not Shakespeare.
Any approach--or combination of approaches--that seems right to you will be right to others if you express your ideas clearly and honestly (meaning, you have read the work carefully and imaginatively and thought about it deeply).
Tamanna Islam:
:)
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