Hamlet and Other Shakespearean Essays

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CUP Archive, 1979 M10 4 - 317 pages
In these Shakespearean essays originally published together in 1979, the distinguished literary critic L. C. Knights offers the fruits of his long-term thinking about individual plays (notably, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Lear) and explores the ways in which a deep and imaginative understanding of Shakespeare's work can relate to and enrich other areas of knowledge - politics, history, social and emotional relationships, the nature of theatrical experience ... Certain critical assumptions are of course implicit here: that great works of art have a continuing life which is renewed through perception; that the vitality generated by such works is for all men and that the critic's function is to encourage all readers to see as much as they can for themselves, not to dogmatize or try to impose a particular reading. L. C. Knights admirably fulfils this function in these essays most of which have been gathered from the three volumes entitled Explorations, Further Explorations and Explorations 3.

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Contents

Personality and Politics in Julius Caesar
82
Timon of Athens
102
Integration in The Winters Tale
119
The Tempest
138
with Some Reflections on the Nature of Tradition
150
The Thought of Shakespeare
172
Shakespeares Tragedies and the Question of Moral Judgment
186
The Question of Character in Shakespeare
201
ΙΟ Historical Scholarship and the Interpretation of Shakespeare
220
King Lear as Metaphor
237
Shakespeare and History
254
How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?
270
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