Customer Reviews:
Going for the Bigger Picture.......2006-06-25
I must agree with the South Australian with the review entitled: "Onesided and simplistic but enduringly useful." This little volume, along with Lovejoy's more ambitious "The Chain of Being," did wonders in helping me crank out Shakespeare term papers as an undergraduate and graduate student. But now that I've left such training wheels behind, I'm perhaps in a better position to issue a few cautionaries. It's not just Richard III who represents a contradiction that violates Tillyard's blueprint but Henry V who, far from representing the exemplary Shakespearean king, becomes a ruthless imperialist invader and sadistic despot, sacrificing innocent women and children simply to make a point. Moreover, the very spokesperson for the stable Elizabethan world picture, Ulysses ("Troilus and Cressida"), proves a vulgar, hypocritical antithesis to his own rosy view.
Regard Tillyard's representation as, at best, a "freeze frame" of the action occurring in Shakespeare's actual language. Approach it as a useful template, or mere starter, for opening a discussion on Shakespeare's churning, rapidly changing meanings, but resist the temptation to interpret the text through the template (unless you don't mind having your head handed back to you). In fact, the scheme's usefulness may be that it served the poet as an organizing tool or convenient metaphor, an alloy to be disposed of once the text was in place, inviting the reader's participation in the life of the language. At that point, we need to jettison the framework, lest it obscure and even distort our view of a character as non-categorizable, life-like and inexhaustible as Falstaff.
A fascinating picture .......2004-11-11
This work gives a picture of the Elizabethean (1580-1605) world- view which Tillyard underlies the work of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Milton and Donne. Tillyard believes that these ideas were widespread in the Age and not the invention of a few great individuals. The fundamental idea of an ordered Chain of Being transformed by Renaissance thought is at the heart of the work.
I do not know enough about Elizabethan history to say how accurate the picture Tillyard draws is. But he gives a fascinating picture of the underlying belief- system of one of the great literary ages of all times.
Ian Myles Slater on: A Standard Introduction.......2003-10-12
Shakespeare and his contemporaries not only wrote in a form of English which is no longer familiar (and may not mean the same thing when it looks familiar), and needs notes on words and grammar to be completely understandable. Like Dante, they lived in a mental world which is now remote and foreign. No matter how universal Shakespeare, or Ben Jonson, or Christopher Marlowe, may seem, it is easy to miss the points of their statements, take the commonplace for the original, the new for the ordinary, and generally impose our own thoughts on their words.
This was in fact the common practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (with some honorable exceptions), but some of the great scholars of the Victorian Age began to try to restore the intellectual context of an epoch that was no longer entirely medieval, but not really modern. Their approach gradually filtered down to students through articles and commentaries. Or, as in this case, an independent introduction to the subject.
For well over half of the twentieth century, E.M.W. Tillyard's handy summary of "The Elizabethan World Picture" gave countless undergraduates, and many curious readers, a short introduction to an often unfamiliar world. A world in which your health rested on a proper balance of humours, which were not your reaction to jokes, but substances flowing through your body. A world in which the Four Elements (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water) were part of a hierarchy beginning with God, and including all the ranks of human beings. A world which was beginning to crumble, as the Eternal Truths of Christianity became contingent on political events, and which needed reassurance, even in popular entertainment.
Tillyard was an interesting critic (he had a famous debate on critical theory with C.S. Lewis, published as "The Personal Heresy"). His major works include a full study of Shakespeare's History Plays, in which he worked out in detail their relation to Elizabethan political theory. It is a little ironic that he may be best known for this short textbook, in which he did not set out to say anything particularly new or original. There are longer, more comprehensive, and far better documented books on the subjects he covers in "The Elizabethan World Picture," but it would be hard to find so convenient and focussed an entrance into this particular lost world of the imagination.
Fascinating in the extreme........2002-02-01
I don't know enough about the Elizabethan time to know what this book may have left out, but I found it utterly fascinating.
People today seem so proud of their own scientific views and look down on older ones as so obviously out of date, but they fail to recognize that given what the people of the time had access to, their worldview was just as consistent with the then known facts as 'ours' is today.
Some day the prevalent worldview may become blatantly wrong according to new facts, and maybe some day people will read about it and be as fascinated by 'our'worldview as I am by the Elizabethan.
This book does a wonderful job of describing the fantastically interconnected parts that make up the Elizabethan worldview, and I find it something worth using to understand and read things written at the time and to remember as metaphor for today.
Human vs. machine.......2001-05-12
In response to "Doc's" review: how can anyone say you cannot understand Shakespeare if you haven't read this book? How silly! Do you not get that Shakespeare is timeless? Shakespeare's play are not documentaries. And this idea to label him "conservative" is silly and irrelevant. Shakespeare's work still lives because it speaks to something human that transcends world views, politics, and years. These are relationships playing out their lives in the imagination of an artist, not elitist agendas that normal people with active imaginations may or may not understand.
Book Description
An exciting new direction for our well-received Treasure Chests series, this highly innovative kit takes children aged 8 to 13 on a vivid, interactive journey back to the Elizabethan era. The world of Shakespeare has never been more accessible, or more engrossing! A full-color, fact-filled book and a series of intriguing components are the vehicles for this fun and education time travel, designed to inspire kids to present their own Shakespearean dramas. A secret drawer opens to reveal games, maps, and the plots of the Bard's most familiar plays, endlessly fascinating in their presentation of intrigue, humor, tragedy, and adventure. Kids can build a wonderfully detailed replica of the Globe Theater, and then use the authentic letter press, complete with printing frame, moveable type, and ink roller, to print up their own posters and handbills in authentic period typefaces.
Customer Reviews:
A Treasure Chest of Shakespearean Discovery!!!.......2003-05-14
This is not a true book, but a delightful book-shaped treasure chest filled with wonderful things to explore the age of Shakespeare. New and complete, "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age" contains a model of the Globe Theater to make; a Shakespearean timeline poster; Map of London from Shakespeare's time; Guide to the plays of Shakespeare; 32-page book about the immortal Bard; and a replica 16th-century printing set to make a personalized print poster (includes movable type and ink!!). This is a great gift for yourself and your favorite Shakespeare freak, young or old.
Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age.......2001-02-10
This is an excellent way to engage older children in exploring literature. There are activities as well as information on the life, times, and works of Shakespeare. It would be difficult for a child younger than nine or ten to complete the projects, but it would be excellent for an older child, especially as an introduction to one of Shakespeare's works. It allows a child to explore the time period as well as the theatre. It is well packaged in a very neat "book" with a drawer and compartments for the various parts; it is easy to store without losing the smaller parts. It even comes with a lock and key!
Average customer rating:
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Journeymen in Murder: The Assassin in English Renaissance Drama
Martin Wiggins
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 0198112289 |
Book Description
Torture and murder are the sort of dirty jobs that rich and powerful men have always considered beneath them. In sixteenth and seventeenth-century English drama, they often employed others to take care of that side of the business of being a villain. Such characters developed from being minor but memorable Elizabethan bit-parts into key figures in some of the greatest Jacobean tragedies: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling. Journeymen in Murder shows how assassins, embroiled though they are in violence and intrigue, often served to address issues of political and moral concern in the period, such as the dangers of tyranny, or the corrupting power of money. The book's scope is broad, covering the entire corpus of English Renaissance drama, and it offers detailed critical consideration of many plays, including several that are here studied in depth for the first time. Throughout, the achievement of major dramatists is placed in the context of other writers' use of similar material, illuminating the ways in which they create their own distinctive and disturbing effects by using playgoers' prior experience of the character.
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Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East, 15761626 (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
Richmond Barbour
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 052165047X |
Book Description
This volume examines early Anglo-Indian relations through trade (with the establishment of the East India Company), tourism, and diplomacy and reveals important differences between traveller reports and the representations of London's press and stage. Richmond Barbour looks closely at exotic visions of "the East," as staged in the playhouses, at court, and on the streets of Shakespeare's London. He follows the efforts of the newly established East India Company, and the careers of England's first tourist and first ambassador in India, Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe.
Book Description
This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age.In its pages, today's best Renaissance scholars chart the cross-currents of belief and daily experience that illuminate the meaning of works by Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton or Webster, as it has changed over time, place and audience. They explain why the plays do or say what they do, and raise provocative possibilities of what the plays might have said to Tudor and Stuart playgoers by discussing values, attitudes, and the material conditions of performance, along with the lives and particular ideas of individual playwrights.
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Governmental Arts In Early Tudor England (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)
Mary Polito
Manufacturer: Ashgate Publishing
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0754634205 |
Book Description
Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures inthe early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of thatexperience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that theEnglish encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representationsinspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of identity formation, and how anxieties about religious conversion, foreign trade and miscegenation were crucial factors in the formation of that identity.
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The Revenger's Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs
Charles A. Hallett , and
Elaine S. Hallett
Manufacturer: University of Nebraska Press
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ASIN: 0803223099 |
Book Description
This new edition of the Companion provides updated information about the principal theaters, playwrights and plays of the most important period of English drama, from 1580-1642. Revised essays are included in chapters on theaters, dramaturgy, political plays, heroic plays, burlesque, comedy, tragedy, and drama produced during the reign of Charles I. Their references have been updated and the substantial biographical and bibliographical section has been expanded. First Edition Hb (1990): 0-521-34657-6 First Edition Pb (1990): 0-521-38662-4
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Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000: The Destined Livery
Roberta Barker
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 140399479X
Release Date: 2007-10-02 |
Book Description
This book examines the representation of gender in selected recent performances of early modern tragedy.
Customer Reviews:
Amazing book, written by a dedicated couple.......2005-04-30
5 years ago we built our house and the builder (thankfully) forgot to put on a chimney cap. That was when I discovered chimney swifts and have enjoyed them in our chinmeny every year. I've been starved for details about these wonderful friends. When I saw that Paul and Georgean Kyle had written a book I *knew* this would be the book to get. They were the first people I found on the internet when I started researching chimney swifs. Because they also do chimney swift rehabilitation, they have been up close and personal with chimney swifts for years. They really know their stuff. They track the chimney swift arrivals across the county each spring, and they host the "chimney swift night out" each fall. They are definitely the experts in my mind and this book is terrific. Throughout the book there are amazing close-up photographs and wonderful drawings to accompany the text. The writing is really enjoyable, like talking with a friend. A very fun, easy, and extremely informative read. I had a hard time putting the book down each night. They cover topics like swift social behavior, courting, nesting, nest building, hatchling development, flight/maneuvers, roosting behavior, migration times and destinations, etc. They also include excellent information on habitat and what we can do to help chimney swifts. Their population has been declining since the 80s and we need to help. There's info on building a chimney swift tower and more. This is a wonderful book that will teach you all about the life and times of chimney swifts and give you ideas for helping them survive into the future. Excellent book. I'd buy it again in a heartbeat and I'm so glad they wrote this book. It has given me so much insight and understanding into what's going on in our chimney. As I write this now, it's late April in Virginia and our swifts arrived just two weeks ago. I can hear them chittering in the chimney, no doubt discussing where to put their nest :).
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- The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
- The God Delusion
- The Golden Bough: Fifteen Volume Set
- The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot
- The Human Record: Sources of Global History Volume II: Since 1500
- The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity
- The Leadership Experience (Thomson - South-Western)
- The Misadventures of Maude March
- The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace
- The Mongol Warlords: Ghengis Khan, Kublai Khan, Hulegu, Tamerlane (Heroes & Warriors)
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A Shakespeare Glossary
Shakespeare's Bawdy (Routledge Classics)
Elizabeth's London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London
The Actor and the Text (Applause Acting Series)
The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
