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13 - Shakespeare tells lies
- from Part II - Shakespeare as author
- Edited by Paul Edmondson, Stanley Wells
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- Book:
- Shakespeare beyond Doubt
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- 05 April 2013
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- 18 April 2013, pp 145-160
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Summary
The obvious place to look for information about a writer is in contextual sources. Hence the relevance of historical and biographical study of literature. But there are distinctions to be made. Poets of the Romantic period seem far nearer to us, and more is in fact known about them: as a result, they appear much more symbiotic on the world about them. Elizabethan writers derive much less, or less clearly, from their time and place. Such knowledge as can be gained may prove a matter of generalization, gossip and myth. Because of the lapse of four centuries, even what is recovered and regarded as circumstantial data may well conflict with deep-rooted snobbish or romantic or simply wilful presuppositions in the enquirer.
Being foxed can lead a researcher to search the work itself for answers it was never intended to give. Some editors and critics suppose that they can find in the Sonnets of Shakespeare a fair young man, and then settle to dispute which Earl he might turn out to be. This kind of interpretation will be wrong from the start, a fact not encouraging to historical scholars. Literature is, as Aristotle once came near to arguing, metaphorical. But there are closer studies of poets’ work that look for information. Scholars who hope to find evidence there, in questions – for instance – of collaboration and attribution, will test Shakespeare's literary and verbal style for what it tells of identity. Such analyses are often interesting, but dogged by a problem that I have never seen properly articulated. Most good actors are brilliant mimics, of their colleagues, their friends and any passing public figures. This seems certain to be true of Burbage and likely to be true of Shakespeare. The gift of imitation was equally likely to have pervaded the poet's verbal style, its gigantic richness, inventiveness and variety gratefully or amusedly absorbing anything of character that offered itself.
Contributors
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- By Rose Teteki Abbey, K. C. Abraham, David Tuesday Adamo, LeRoy H. Aden, Efrain Agosto, Victor Aguilan, Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Charanjit Kaur AjitSingh, Dorothy B E A Akoto, Giuseppe Alberigo, Daniel E. Albrecht, Ruth Albrecht, Daniel O. Aleshire, Urs Altermatt, Anand Amaladass, Michael Amaladoss, James N. Amanze, Lesley G. Anderson, Thomas C. Anderson, Victor Anderson, Hope S. Antone, María Pilar Aquino, Paula Arai, Victorio Araya Guillén, S. Wesley Ariarajah, Ellen T. Armour, Brett Gregory Armstrong, Atsuhiro Asano, Naim Stifan Ateek, Mahmoud Ayoub, John Alembillah Azumah, Mercedes L. García Bachmann, Irena Backus, J. Wayne Baker, Mieke Bal, Lewis V. Baldwin, William Barbieri, António Barbosa da Silva, David Basinger, Bolaji Olukemi Bateye, Oswald Bayer, Daniel H. Bays, Rosalie Beck, Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Guy-Thomas Bedouelle, Chorbishop Seely Beggiani, Wolfgang Behringer, Christopher M. Bellitto, Byard Bennett, Harold V. Bennett, Teresa Berger, Miguel A. Bernad, Henley Bernard, Alan E. Bernstein, Jon L. Berquist, Johannes Beutler, Ana María Bidegain, Matthew P. Binkewicz, Jennifer Bird, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Dmytro Bondarenko, Paulo Bonfatti, Riet en Pim Bons-Storm, Jessica A. Boon, Marcus J. Borg, Mark Bosco, Peter C. Bouteneff, François Bovon, William D. Bowman, Paul S. Boyer, David Brakke, Richard E. Brantley, Marcus Braybrooke, Ian Breward, Ênio José da Costa Brito, Jewel Spears Brooker, Johannes Brosseder, Nicholas Canfield Read Brown, Robert F. Brown, Pamela K. Brubaker, Walter Brueggemann, Bishop Colin O. Buchanan, Stanley M. Burgess, Amy Nelson Burnett, J. Patout Burns, David B. Burrell, David Buttrick, James P. Byrd, Lavinia Byrne, Gerado Caetano, Marcos Caldas, Alkiviadis Calivas, William J. Callahan, Salvatore Calomino, Euan K. Cameron, William S. Campbell, Marcelo Ayres Camurça, Daniel F. Caner, Paul E. Capetz, Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, Patrick W. Carey, Barbara Carvill, Hal Cauthron, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Mark D. 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Jacob, Arthur James, Maria Jansdotter-Samuelsson, David Jasper, Werner G. Jeanrond, Renée Jeffery, David Lyle Jeffrey, Theodore W. Jennings, David H. Jensen, Robin Margaret Jensen, David Jobling, Dale A. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Maxwell E. Johnson, Sarah Johnson, Mark D. Johnston, F. Stanley Jones, James William Jones, John R. Jones, Alissa Jones Nelson, Inge Jonsson, Jan Joosten, Elizabeth Judd, Mulambya Peggy Kabonde, Robert Kaggwa, Sylvester Kahakwa, Isaac Kalimi, Ogbu U. Kalu, Eunice Kamaara, Wayne C. Kannaday, Musimbi Kanyoro, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Frank Kaufmann, Léon Nguapitshi Kayongo, Richard Kearney, Alice A. Keefe, Ralph Keen, Catherine Keller, Anthony J. Kelly, Karen Kennelly, Kathi Lynn Kern, Fergus Kerr, Edward Kessler, George Kilcourse, Heup Young Kim, Kim Sung-Hae, Kim Yong-Bock, Kim Yung Suk, Richard King, Thomas M. King, Robert M. Kingdon, Ross Kinsler, Hans G. Kippenberg, Cheryl A. 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Yee, Viktor Yelensky, Yeo Khiok-Khng, Gustav K. K. Yeung, Angela Yiu, Amos Yong, Yong Ting Jin, You Bin, Youhanna Nessim Youssef, Eliana Yunes, Robert Michael Zaller, Valarie H. Ziegler, Barbara Brown Zikmund, Joyce Ann Zimmerman, Aurora Zlotnik, Zhuo Xinping
- Edited by Daniel Patte, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity
- Published online:
- 05 August 2012
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- 20 September 2010, pp xi-xliv
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Inside Othello
- Edited by Peter Holland, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 02 November 2000, pp 184-195
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Summary
All Shakespeare’s major tragedies but one take their source from true or mythical history, whether British or classical or European. To the Elizabethan mind, not yet as relativistic about history as ourselves, this plainly invested tragedy with a special privilege, a depth and reach, a stability as of truth itself. Othello is the exception; it takes its story from fiction only. Cinthio’s narrative of a jealous Moor in Venice, a man trapped in sexual intrigue, necessarily bequeaths to the play a yarn urban and realistic in its hard knowingness, its concise brutality, its final lack of the metaphysical. Jealousy, the very centre of the story, is nothing if not a function of love as possession and possessiveness. That Shakespeare was aware of these limiting pressures is clear from the brilliance of his evocation, in two plays, of Venice as the greatest trading-centre of Europe, its riches both extreme and vulnerable. All the many readers who have seen in Othello what Bradley once called its lack of universality, seen the problem of meaning in this tragedy of love-trade, are surely seeing in the play Cinthio’s source: tragedy as mere narrative.
The Impact of a Crime Wave: Perceptions, Fear, and Confidence in the Police
- Mary Holland Baker, Barbara C. Nienstedt, Ronald S. Everett, Richard McCleary
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- Journal:
- Law & Society Review / Volume 17 / Issue 2 / 1983
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 July 2024, pp. 319-335
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- 1983
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In 1980, Phoenix, Arizona, experienced a “crime wave.” A structural equation model based on a two-wave survey of the population shows that the crime wave had a powerful impact that was almost a mirror image of what the fear of crime literature would predict. Demographic groups thought to be most fearful (e.g., women and the elderly) were least affected while groups thought to be least fearful (e.g., well-educated whites) were affected most. In addition to demographic factors, our analysis demonstrates that crime rate perceptions and confidence in the police are integral components of fear, especially in the context of a crime wave. These findings have important implications for crime policy specifically and for criminological research generally.
‘Spanish’ Othello: The Making of Shakespeare’s Moor
- Edited by Stanley Wells
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 25 November 1982, pp 101-112
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Many studies of Othello confront as a vital problem what they see as some inherent randomness in the play. The current agreement, too, that the work is a ‘domestic tragedy’ may more tacitly voice the same reaction, depending as it seems to do on Bradley’s sense of the play as less great than the others of the Big Four, because the dramatist had not fully succeeded in universalizing his materials – a judgement that brings us back to that ‘randomness’ again. This widespread reaction among readers and critics is not my subject here; I want to use it only to suggest that if that randomness really does survive in Othello as an achieved work of art, then it surely originates from the play’s main source, Cinthio’s prose narrative. It is hard for a reader of Shakespeare not to define literary merit as quantity of meaning – even in a case like Othello where the ‘meaning’ in a higher sense is still distinctly moot; the play, despite all the doubt, means a good deal to us. Of merit or meaning in that sense Cinthio’s story has little. Given what we cannot help finding the mere externality of its avowed moral, its only meaning lies in the purposiveness of the Ensign’s love-jealousy; when Shakespeare removes or blurs this he leaves what remains of the narrative as a succession of events that are’ cruel’, almost in the modern sense of ‘absurd’.
‘Hamlet’: A Time to Die
- Edited by Kenneth Muir
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- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 17 November 1977, pp 117-124
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‘Why does Hamlet delay?’ The question has been asked for over two hundred years now. And whether or not it is the best way to interrogate the play, it seems now a natural one. For after every new reading or performance, it’s difficult to avoid that prickling, sympathetic and exasperated sensation which formulates itself as: ‘Why does Hamlet delay?’ Whatever more correct form the enquiry takes, something to do with time does seem to be at the centre of Hamlet: which – to the extent that the play tells this kind of truth at all – makes the whole of life a great waiting game. The prince himself, who doesn’t know everything, and whose knowledge is above all that he doesn’t know everything, chooses to call what is happening to him, delay; and chooses to find himself guilty of it; or finds himself guilty, whether or not he chooses; and in all these ways, may be right. The qualifications are made necessary by everything in Hamlet that makes the simple and direct ‘Why does Hamlet delay?’ not the best of questions, though a natural one. All questions are leading, and condition the object of enquiry in the direction of what we want to know about it. To ask this particular one is to push Hamlet towards presuppositions about life and literature which are in themselves doubtful, and which almost certainly didn’t come into being until the period at which the question about Hamlet began to be asked about: the middle of the eighteenth century.