Bøker av Maurice Charney

How to Read Shakespeare offers an approach to Shakespeare through reading and seeing his plays. The assumption is that Shakespeare's plays are fully comprehensible to modern readers and theater-goers and that they can be thoroughly enjoyed. The author approaches the plays creatively without the barriers of academic study. Some of the specific topics studied are Dramatic Conventions, The Poetry of the Theater, Shakespeare's Characters, Structure and Dramatic Scene, The Presented Text, and The World of the Play: Theatrical Significances. How to Read Shakespeare encourages readers to develop their «histrionic imagination.»

Shakespeare's Style presents a detailed consideration of aspects of Shakespeare's writing style in his plays. Each chapter offers a detailed discussion about a single feature of style in a chosen Shakespeare play. Topics examine include: a discussion of a key image or images, both verbal and nonverbal; consideration of the way a character is put together; reflection of the changing audience response to a character; and audience response to an account of the speech rhythms of a single play. This book will be of interest to audiences who see Shakespeare's plays, readers of the printed page, and students aiding them in concentrating on the significant ways that Shakespeare expresses himself.

The former president of the Shakespeare Association of America provides a play-by-play, poem-by-poem guide to all of Shakespeare's works.

Shakespeares Villains is a close reading of Shakespeares plays to investigate the nature of evil. Charney closely considers the way that dramatic characters are developed in terms of language, imagery, and nonverbal stage effects. With chapters on Iago, Tarquin, Aaron, Richard Duke of Glaucester, Shylock, Claudius, Polonius, Macbeth, Edmund, Goneril, Regan, Angelo, Tybalt, Don John, Iachimo, Lucio, Julius Caesar, Leontes, and Duke Frederick, this book is the first comprehensive study of the villains in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was acutely aware of our intimate struggles with aging. His dramatic characters either prosper or suffer according to their relationship with maturity, and his sonnets eloquently explore time's ravaging effects. "e;Wrinkled deep in time"e; is how the queen describes herself in Antony and Cleopatra, and at the end of King Lear, there is a tragic sense that both the king and Gloucester have acquired a wisdom they otherwise lacked at the beginning of the play. Even Juliet matures considerably before she drinks Friar Lawrence's potion, and Macbeth and his wife prematurely grow old from their murderous schemes.Drawing on historical documents and the dramatist's own complex depictions, Maurice Charney conducts an original investigation into patterns of aging in Shakespeare, exploring the fulfillment or distress of Shakespeare's characters in combination with their mental and physical decline. Comparing the characterizations of elderly kings and queens, older lovers, patriarchal men, matriarchal women, and the senex the stereotypical old man of Roman comedy with the history of life expectancy in Shakespeare's England, Charney uncovers similarities and differences between our contemporary attitudes toward aging and aging as it was understood more than four hundred years ago. From this dynamic examination, a new perspective on Shakespeare emerges, one that celebrates and deepens our knowledge of his subtler themes and characters.

The complex and sometimes contradictory expressions of love in Shakespeare's works-ranging from the serious to the absurd and back again-arise primarily from his dramatic and theatrical flair rather than from a unified philosophy of love. Untangling his witty, bawdy (and ambiguous) treatment of love, sex, and desire requires a sharp eye and a steady hand. In Shakespeare on Love and Lust, noted scholar Maurice Charney delves deeply into Shakespeare's rhetorical and thematic development of this largest of subjects to reveal what makes his plays and poems resonate with contemporary audiences. The paradigmatic star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet, the comic confusions of couples wandering through the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello's tragic jealousy, the homoerotic ways Shakespeare played with cross-dressing on the Elizabethan stage-Charney explores the world in which Shakespeare lived, and how it is reflected and transformed in the one he created.While focusing primarily on desire between young lovers, Charney also explores themes of love in marriage (Brutus and Portia) and in same-sex pairings (Antonio and Sebastian). Against the conventions of Renaissance literature, Shakespeare qualified the Platonic view that true love transcends the physical. Instead, as Charney demonstrates, love in Shakespeare's work is almost always sexual as well as spiritual, and the full range of desire's dramatic possibilities is displayed.Shakespeare on Love and Lust begins by considering the ways in which Shakespeare drew upon and satirized the conventions of Petrarchan Renaissance love poetry in plays like Romeo and Juliet, then explores how courtship is woven into the basic plot formula of the comedies. Next, Charney examines love in the tragedies and the enemies of love (Iago, for example). Later chapters cover the gender complications in such plays as Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew as well as the homoerotic themes woven into many of the poems and plays. Charney concludes with a lively discussion of paradoxes and ambivalences about love expressed by Shakespeare's word play and sexual innuendoes.