Most of Shakespeare’s tragedies have a family drama at their heart. This book brings these relationships to life, offering a radical new perspective on the tragic heroes and their dilemmas. Family Dramas: Intimacy, Power and Systems in Shakespeare's Tragedies focusses on the interactions and dialogues between people on stage, linking their intimate emotional worlds to wider social and political contexts. Since family relationships absorb and enact social ideologies, their conflicts often expose the conflicts that all ideologies contain. The complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of Shakespeare’s portrayals of individuals and their relationships are brought to life, while wider power structures and social discourses are shown to reach into the heart of intimate relationships and personal identity. Surveying relevant literature from Shakespeare studies, the book introduces the ideas behind the family systems approach to literary criticism. Explorations of gender relationships feature particularly strongly in the analysis since it is within gender that intimacy and power most compellingly intersect and frequently collide. For Shakespeare lovers and psychotherapists alike, this application of systemic theory opens a new perspective on familiar literary territory.

From the star-crossed romance of Romeo and Juliet to Othello's misguided murder of Desdemona to the betrayal of King Lear by his daughters, family life is central to Shakespeare's dramas. This book helps students learn about family life in Shakespeare's England and in his plays. The book begins with an overview of the roots of Renaissance family life in the classical era and Middle Ages. This is followed by an extended consideration of family life in Elizabethan England. The book then explores how Shakespeare treats family life in his plays. Later chapters then examine how productions of his plays have treated scenes related to family life, and how scholars and critics have responded to family life in his works. The volume closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources. The volume begins with a look at the classical and medieval background of family life in the Early Modern era. This is followed by a sustained discussion of family life in Shakespeare's world. The book then examines issues related to family life across a broad range of Shakespeare's works. Later chapters then examine how productions of the plays have treated scenes concerning family life, and how scholars and critics have commented on family life in Shakespeare's writings. The volume closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources for student research. Students of literature will value this book for its illumination of critical scenes in Shakespeare's works, while students in social studies and history courses will appreciate its use of Shakespeare to explore daily life in the Elizabethan age.

Throws light on the problem of what Shakespeare was doing between leaving school and appearing as an actor and playwright in London.

Using the evidence of wills and inventories, Jeanne Jones has built up a detailed picture of everyday life in Stratford, with chapters on where and how people lived, what they did for a living, standards of literacy, marriage, families and friends

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What makes us the people we are? Culture evidently plays a part, but how large a part? Is culture alone the source of our identities? Some have argued that human nature is the foundation of culture, others that culture is the foundation of human identity. Catherine Belsey calls for a more nuanced, relational account of what it is to be human, and in doing so puts forward a significant new theory of culture. Culture and the Real explains with Professor Belsey's characteristic lucidity the views of recent theorists, including Jean-François Lyotard, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, as well as their debt to the earlier work of Kant and Hegel, in order to take issue with their accounts of what it is to be human. To explore the human, she demonstrates, is to acknowledge the relationship between culture and what we don't know: not the familiar world picture presented to us by culture as 'reality', but the unsayable, or the strange region that lies beyond culture, which Lacan has called 'the real'. Culture, she argues, registers a sense of its own limits in ways more subtle than the theorists allow. This volume builds on the insights of Belsey's influential Critical Practice to provide not only an accessible introduction to contemporary theories of what it is to be human, but a major new contribution to current debates about culture. Taking examples from film and art, fiction and poetry, Culture and the Real is essential reading for those studying or working in cultural criticism, within the fields of English, Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Art History.