Thread replies: 10
Thread images: 1
Thread images: 1
File: Thomas_Betterton_as_Hamlet.jpg (2MB, 1582x2688px) Image search:
[Google]
2MB, 1582x2688px
I saw a performance of Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon this summer. It made me want to read some Shakespeare again or maybe a good book about him. Anyone have any recommendations? I've read every play except for The Two Noble Kinsmen, so that's on the list. I would not mind reading some of the old plays again, but it would be interesting to read a decent book on the bard.
Pic related is a Restoration era performance of Hamlet.
>>
>>8443596
Harold Bloom's major obsession is on Shakespeare. Read that one, called something like Invention of the Human I think it's called. Shakespeare is one of the few areas where he comes across as very insightful.
>>
>>8443604
Maybe I'll give that one another look. I thought the premise of that book to be a bit of a stretch.
>>
>>8443693
Everything Harold Bloom proposes is a stretch, but he does have a point. Shakespeare did make a lot of headway in regards to normalizing the self-reflecting character. Before his era, most of literature's "reflective characters" were deemed so simply for being morally upright against temptations, which was still rare then. For example, Dante and Aeneas and Odysseus. Which is why so much pre-modern literature feels so simple minded in comparison. The stretch is where Bloom ascribes this shift almost entirely to Shakespeare.
>>
>>8443596
Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garber
>>
>>8443714
I agree with Bloom that there was a change in consciousness in the early Modern period, but it does seem like a stretch to pin that on Shakespeare alone. I read something similar that a historian proposed a big change in consciousness happened around the Bronze Age collapse and that you can see this shift happen in Homer's own writing, wherein the Iliad characters are influenced by the gods, while Odysseus in the Odyssey appears to think for himself rather than act on the gods' commands.
>>8443743
I remember seeing that book at the library. What did you think about it?
>>
>>8443842
Oh yes, that Homer one you're referring to is The Bicameral Mind. The problem with that book is that it makes the gigantic step of assuming humans around the time of the Iliad's action actually had a psychology so different, that they weren't quite conscious and self reflective, and that by the time of the writing of the Odessey, that changed. Hard to buy at all.
>>
>>8443901
Yeah, I thought it was a bit phooey too, the Homer thing, but the bit about the Early Modern period shift seems more credible to me because we have a greater volume of literature to prove it.
>>
The Development of Shakespeare’s imagery, by Wolfgang Clemen
>>
>>8443842I haven't read it (typical /lit/), but read some reviews of the book and would have bought it if I wasn't poor
Thread posts: 10
Thread images: 1
Thread images: 1