By Ronald Knowles
ISBN-10: 0333711424
ISBN-13: 9780333711422
This selection of essays reassesses quite a number Shakespeare's performs relating to carnivalesque conception. The performs mentioned contain: "Henry IV"; "Romeo and Juliet"; "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; "The Merry better halves of Windsor"; "Hamlet"; "Measure For Measure"; "The Winter's Tale"; and "Henry VIII". members re-historicize the carnivalesque in several methods, supplying either a built software, or critique of, Bakhtin's thought.
'There isn't any proposal extra efficient in Shakespeare stories than Carnival, but not anyone extra arguable than Mikhail Bakhtin, the critic who taught Shakespeareans to use it. Shakespeare and Carnival spans this contradiction via interpreting the performs either "After Bakhtin" and inside ongoing debate approximately early smooth violence. So the essays during this assortment locate Carnival styles not just in magnificent locations - from the Capulets' tomb to the Cardinal's palace - yet in startling cultural contexts. right here Jack Cade materialises because the actor Will Kemp; Falstaff arises as a gruesome Puritan; and Paulina emerges as a Shrovetide jester. this can be a quantity, then, that reminds us of Bakhtin's affinity to Carl Orff - in idealising the tub-thumping "volk" - but additionally his lasting relevance to Brueghel, Rabelais and Shakespeare. it is going to be an quintessential advisor no matter if Shakespearean Carnival is studied for its revellers or its scapegoats.'
- Richard Wilson, Professor of Renaissance stories, Lancaster University
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Extra info for Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin
Sample text
A properly Bakhtinian reading cannot accommodate asides. But it does not have to. Whilst asides are clearly appropriate to the court scenes preceding the rising, Bakhtin’s insistence on the place of laughter in ‘the second life of the people’ offers a way of reading encompassing the mocking contradictions the rising’s ‘asides’ seem to embody. Carnivalesque laughter ‘is festive; it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants; it is ambivalent, it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time, mocking, deriding.
In the Nurse’s speech and laughter life-affirming joyousness subsumes the metaphysics of religion and death, banishes fear, and celebrates the regenerative cycle of organic being – the essence of carnival. As the Nurse represents a certain kind of love and life which is contrasted in the play with romantic love and death, so at a conscious level, probably taking a few hints from Chaucer, Shakespeare seems to have contrasted malign fate with the Nurse as benign fortune. The Nurse, like Friar Laurence, has several functions within the play beyond the limitations of naturalist character furthering plot.
Frank Albers, ‘Utopia, Reality and Representation: the case of Jack Cade’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 127 (1991), p. 78; see also William Hawley, Critical Hermeneutics and Shakespeare’s History Plays (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), p. 41. Michael Hattaway, ‘Rebellion, Class Consciousness, and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI’, Cahiers Élisabéthains 33 (1988), p. 18; see also Pugliatti, p. 170. For one of the most extreme formulations of this position, see Derek Cohen, The Politics of Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1993), p.