Shakespeare and the Problem Play

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A01=E.L. Risden
Author_E.L. Risden
Category=DSBD
Category=DSG
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
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Product details

  • ISBN 9780786472437
  • Weight: 318g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 22 Oct 2012
  • Publisher: McFarland & Co Inc
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Shakespeare's plays provide a rich source of genre variation as well as moral or ethical issues that invite deep study. The genre issue often proves the very moral crux where Shakespeare raises the most complex questions. He aimed to build good plays, not simple fulfillments of genre demands. To him "good plays" meant leaving his audience with problems to consider.

This book begins with those works most commonly appearing in studies of problem plays, The Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure; moves to some comedic problem plays, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night; and then to tragic problem plays, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. It concludes with some problems in the history and romance genres for the issues they raise in love, adventure, and governance: Henry IV, Part 1, Henry V, Cymbeline, The Tempest, and Love's Labor's Lost.

E.L. Risden, emeritus professor of English at St. Norbert College, lives in De Pere, Wisconsin, where he continues to write literary and movie scholarship, speculative fiction, and occasional poetry.

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