By David Farley-Hills
David Farley-Hills argues that Shakespeare didn't paintings in best isolation, yet answered as the other playwright to the economic and inventive pressures of his time. during this e-book he deals an interpretation of 7 of Shakespeare's performs within the gentle of pressures exerted through his significant modern competitors. The performs mentioned are Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, All's good That Ends good, Othello, degree for degree, Timon of Athens, and King Lear.
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Extra resources for Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights, 1600-1606
Example text
Eleanor Prosser, in her stimulating book, Hamlet and Revenge (2nd edn, 1971), appeals to Senecan convention to explain Hamlet’s conduct in the ‘nunnery’ scene. Hamlet is tempted into irrational rage by the Ghost’s demand for revenge, his treatment of Ophelia illustrates the well-attested Elizabethan theme that revenge is a form of madness. Again this is a persuasive argument, especially when presented with such impressive documentation as Prosser musters, but it presupposes an objective standpoint which Shakespeare steadfastly refuses to give us.
Antonio triumphs over the vicious Piero, who is duly made to eat the seed of his own evil nature; God’s providence is asserted. Antonio’s triumph, however, is not a vindication of human nature, for we are all ‘vermin bred of putrefacted slime’ (IV, iv, 2) as theologians from St Augustine to Luther and Calvin have repeatedly reminded us. We achieve God’s purposes in spite of the evil nature we all share. Arriving in Shakespeare’s Denmark from the lands of Lust’s Dominion, Hoffman, and—even more—Antonio’s Revenge, is at first an extraordinary experience of arriving back into the familiar world of ordinary people going about recognizably ordinary business, and this in spite of the mystery of the play’s opening and the appearance of the Ghost.
For there is a marked difference between the affective methods of the popular revenge tragedy and the ‘alienating’ techniques of Troilus. But before we seek to explain and account for this difference, we need to look at Heywood’s Iron Age more closely to see there an example of the kind of play we might have expected a popular playwright to make out of the matter of Troy round about 1600. This is all the more interesting because Heywood’s drama seems to have been outstandingly popular. 11 Such popularity makes Shakespeare’s use of and reference to the play all the more plausible.