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Contrary to the view that Shakespeare was careless with plot details,
Circumstantial Shakespeare reveals how he actually used circumstance to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires of his characters, thus creating coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the feelings of characters inhabiting them.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: 'Quando?' (When?) in Romeo and Juliet
- 2: 'Imaginary Work': Opportunity in Lucrece and in King Lear
- 3: Where and How? Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Maid's Tragedy
- 4: 'The Innocent Sleepe': Motive in Macbeth
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Lorna Hutson is the Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She was educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh and Oxford and has taught at Queen Mary, University of London and at the University of California at Berkeley. Her books include
Thomas Nashe in Context (1989),
The Usurer's Daughter (1994),
Feminism and Renaissance Studies (1999),
Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (with Victoria Kahn, 2001) and
The Invention of Suspicion (2007), which won the Roland H. Bainton prize for literature in 2008. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim, the Folger, the Huntington, the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust.
Summary
Contrary to the view that Shakespeare was careless with plot details, Circumstantial Shakespeare reveals how he actually used circumstance to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires of his characters, thus creating coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the feelings of characters inhabiting them.
Additional text
richly and compactly argued ... The implications of the thesis are far-reaching ... Written in an engaging, cerebral style by one of the foremost scholars of Renaissance humanism and theatre, Circumstantial Shakespeare urges a new perspective on Shakespeare's artistry.
