Much Ado about Greek tragedy? Shakespeare, Euripides, and the histoire tragique (original) (raw)

SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDY AND LAMB’S TALE: A STUDY OF OTHELLO

This paper aims at a comparative study of Shakespeare’s Othello and Lamb’s Tale of Othello. In doing so, it traces back the emergence of tragedy in Renaissance and fiction in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as two separate genres. It also points out the deviations of Lamb’s Tale from the Shakespearean oeuvre in order to appropriate the Bard’s masterpiece for children’s entertainment and education.

Shakespeare’s Mastery of Plot and Comedy in Much Ado About Nothing

Sanat Dergisi

It is a well-known fact that William Shakespeare, just like many of his contemporaries, was influenced by earlier literary and non-literary sources while he was writing his plays. However, Shakespeare did not remain true to the sources by which he was inspired neither in terms of content nor form. Much Ado About Nothing, which he wrote by making use of the features of New Comedy genre that had emerged in the Ancient Greece, is undoubtedly an indicative of his mastery of plot and comedy. The playwright, while utilizing the genre of New Comedy, brought novelties to the play showing his genius and he knitted, so to speak, the plot structure in a conscientious manner. This study aims to analyse the mastery of Shakespeare in creating the plot structure and comedy, to show the features of the New Comedy he made use of and to investigate the elements which are purely Shakespearean in Much Ado About Nothing.

Shakespearean Tragedies and Inconsistencies of the Renaissance ERA

IJASS JOURNAL, 2022

This research explores the elements of tragedy in selected Shakespearean dramas. The Greek philosopher Aristotle investigated and defined tragedy's nature, while the dramatists of ancient Greece cemented its characteristics and qualities. Shakespeare defied the established conventions by classics to get closer to reality. The theories presented by Irving Ribner and A. C. Bradley support this study. Three key points of view that define Shakespeare as a dramatist show his concept of tragedy: the tragic hero, the tragic action (or plot), and catharsis, which this essay tries to explain. This research shows the characteristics of Shakespearean tragedies by comparing them with Greek tragedies. A Shakespearean tragedy has many qualities, as it shows inconsistencies of the Renaissance era, foreshadows romanticism and realism, and shows the human psyche. Shakespeare's humanism best demonstrates by the fact that he has such a deep appreciation for the suffering of the human spirit.

Sour Nothings: Seeing and Being Seen in Shakespeare's Much Ado

1989

In its unfolding, Much Ado presents a critique not only of the reigning conventions of the Messinian social order, but also of its own possibilities as a comedy. In the process of undoing while simultaneously unfolding itself, the play explicitly criticizes both naïve overdependence on manifestations and report, and paranoid insistence on "legalistic" standards of proof. In order to understand how Shakespeare's critique operates, it is necessary (1) to specify the "extra-literary" discourses against which this critique takes shape-i.e., courtly and legal discourses; (2) to put in context Shakespeare's representation of slander as a medium of material and physical injury; and (3) to demonstrate that what seems to be a flattened or "allegorized" representation of agency in the play is actually consistent with contemporary conceptions of slander's "psychological" effects. In the process, I hope to at least suggest ways in which the play questions its own conventions.

Iago and the Dramatic Transmission of Renaissance Semiotic Theory in Othello

"Recent studies demonstrate that Iago’s linguistic manipulations of reality in Othello (1622) reflect a wider shift in conceptions of Renaissance signification. Alessandro Serpieri compares Iago’s falsification of dramatic signifiers to simulacra (136), and Àgnes Matuska picks up on this observation to argue that Iago’s personification of linguistic signs encapsulates the “radically new forms of representation made possible by the historical, cultural, and epistemological changes often grouped under the term early modern” (46). Othello thus reflects a rhetorical turn in the conception of how language carries or produces potentially false meaning. By situating these studies within the dramaturgical method proposed by rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke, I elaborate on Matuska’s hypothesis to clarify additional parameters of Renaissance signification. My analysis addresses key classical and Renaissance texts that investigate what I term proto- semiotic theory. These works include Cicero’s De Oratore (55 BCE), Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen (c. 414 BCE), Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589), and Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1533). Not only did elite members of Shakespeare’s audience study these texts at grammar school, as Shakespeare did, but Shakespeare’s writing itself transmitted rhetorical theory to a popular audience. Therefore, as what Burke calls a terministic screen—a symbolic system by which an audience hears and interprets something beyond the screen itself—Othello draws on philosophical anxieties from outside the play. When combined with evidence from contemporary rhetorical studies, Burke’s terminology allows me to refine Matuska’s observations. By condemning the harmful aspects of language as embodied in Iago, spectators achieve a psychological release by punishing the villain for acting out universal linguistic transgressions. Renaissance proto-semiotic theory, therefore, as transmitted through Othello, acknowledges that signifiers do not always point to true meaning, without quite accepting that all linguistic terms are always already simulacra."

Othello: A Review of Its Faults and Problems

2016

William Shakespeare’s Othello is indubitably one of his most popular and successful plays.Nevertheless, like his other great works, it suffers from some literary and stylistic faults and problems. Several eminent critics such as Thomas Rymer, Samuel Johnson, A. C. Bradley, Harley Granville Barker, and J. Dover Wilson have dealt with this issue. Some of the most important faults they have found in this play include the question of time, the improbability of the events, the inconsistency of characterization, moral defects, and the absence of poetic justice. In some cases, the faults attributed to this great play are the result of misguided and wrongheaded criticism; in others, however, they are real deficiencies resulted from Shakespeare’s carelessness or his concern over the success of his play in performance rather than its plausibility and critical correctness as aliterary text. In the present article, these problems are discussed, and it is explained whether they are serious probl...

Commedia dell'arte in Othello: a Satiric Comedy Ending in Tragedy

A close reading of The Tragedy of Othello in light of the popularity of improvised commedia dell'arte in Italy at the time the play was written suggests that commedia dell'arte strongly influenced the composition of the play, but this influence has not been fully appreciated by Shakespeare scholarship. If this interpretation of the literary and historical evidence is persuasive, the play becomes a brilliant, satirical comedy derived from commedia dell'arte but with a disturbing, tragic ending, not the traditional romantic tragedy that has puzzled commentators. The question then becomes when and where the dramatist learned so much about the Italian commedia dell'arte to be able to draw on it so extensively in Othello and other plays. In this new reading, the seven principal characters, from Othello the general to Emilia the maid, have their prototypes in characters of commedia dell'arte. Much of the action reflects the rough comedy of commedia dell'arte; and Iago's gleeful, improvised manipulation of the other characters mirrors the improvised performances of commedia dell'arte. Arguably, this reading also offers readers, theater directors and playgoers the promise of a new and deeper appreciation of the play as a bitter satire of human folly that entertains, disorients and unsettles, denying the audience the Aristotelian catharsis of tragedy. Although a few Shakespeare scholars have noted traces of commedia dell'arte in several plays, notably The Tempest, its influence on Othello has been almost completely ignored. It's not discussed in the many scholarly, single-volume editions, including those by E. A. J. Honigmann, Michael Neill, Kim Hall, Russ McDonald and Edward Pechter. Nor is there anything on it in the collected works of Shakespeare, such as the Riverside, Norton, Pelican, Oxford or most recently the RSC edition from Random House. The focus is on other sources and influences, principally Cinthio's

The “author’s drift” in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: A Poetics of Reflection

"This essay focuses on the role of the author in Troilus and Cressida as a stage-play that is highly sensitive to the role of the book in shaping expectations of its theatre audience. The argument takes from Lukas Erne the notion that when Shakespeare wrote many of his plays, he was aware that they were making their way into print, but aims to qualify the idea of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist who arranges his work for publication by considering the ways in which Troilus and Cressida as a stage-play is already literary to begin with. Focusing on the scene in which Achilles and Ulysses discuss an author and his book, it explores the poetics of reflection that seems to be at work between characters, authors, and audiences, the page and the stage. Emphasising ways in which Shakespeare responds to Jonson’s construction of an author, the essay questions the distinction between Shakespeare as the author of strictly theatrical or literary texts by considering how the book can be performative and the theatre literary."