Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare’s model of mutualistic character, in which "entangled" language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare’s liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright’s sublime effects. As the argument develops, the Shakespearean sublime emerges as an emotional state of vulnerable exhilaration leading to an ethically uplifting openness towards others and an epistemologically bracing awareness of human unknowability. Taken together, Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos and Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos: Matter, Stage, Form breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates a sublime mood or ethos which predisposes audiences intellectually and emotionally for the full experience of sublime pathos, explored in the companion volume, Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare’s invention of sublime matter, his exploitation of the special characteristics of the Elizabethan stage, and his dramaturgical and formal simulacra of absolute space and time. In the process, it considers Shakespeare’s conception of the universe and man’s place in it and uncovers the epistemological and existential implications of key aspects of his art. As the argument unfolds, a case is made for a transhistorically baroque Shakespeare whose "bastard art" enables the dramatic restoration of an original innocence where ignorance really is bliss. Taken together, Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos and Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

Shakespeare and Happiness is a study of attitudes to happiness in the early modern period and in Shakespeare’s plays. It considers the conflicting influences of religion and Aristotelian philosophy in shaping attitudes to the possibility of attaining happiness. By being the first book to focus specifically on the representation of happiness in Shakespeare’s plays, it contributes to feminist approaches to Shakespeare by foregrounding the important role of women in showing the right way to live and achieve happiness. timely criticism, as it considers Shakespeare in the current context of the #MeToo movement providing new insights to studies of the emotions by approaching them from the perspective of research conducted by positive psychologists. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines methodologies from literature, psychology philosophy, religion and history, emphasizing the richness and complexity of Shakespeare’s exploration of the nature of happiness.

Patrick Cheney's new book places the sublime at the heart of poems and plays in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, Cheney argues for the importance of an 'early modern sublime' to the advent of modern authorship in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Chapters feature a model of creative excellence and social liberty that helps explain the greatness of the English Renaissance. Cheney's argument revises the received wisdom, which locates the sublime in the eighteenth-century philosophical 'subject'. The book demonstrates that canonical works like The Faerie Queene and King Lear reinvent sublimity as a new standard of authorship. This standard emerges not only in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical and Christian goodness but also in the eternizing greatness of the author's work: free, heightened, ecstatic. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a catalyst in the formation of an English canon.

Bringing together current intermedial discourses on Shakespeare, music, and dance with the affective turn in the humanities, Dramaturgies of Love in Romeo and Juliet offers a unique and highly innovative transdisciplinary discussion of "unspeakable" love in one of the most famous love stories in literary history: the tragic romance of Romeo and Juliet. Through in-depth case studies and historical contextualisation, this book showcases how the "woes that no words can sound" of Shakespeare’s iconic lovers nevertheless have found expression not only in his verbal poetry, but also in non-verbal adaptations of the play in 19th-century symphonic music and 20th- and 21st-century theatre dance. Combining methodological approaches from diverse disciplines, including affect theory, musicology, and dance studies, this study opens up a new perspective onto the artistic representation of love, defining amorous emotion as a generically transformative constellation of dialogic performativity. To explore how this constellation has become manifest across the arts, this book analyses and compares dramatic, musical, and choreographic dramatisations of love in William Shakespeare’s early modern tragedy, French composer Hector Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), and the staging of Berlioz’s symphony by German contemporary choreographer Sasha Waltz for the Paris Opera Ballet (2007). Chapters 1 and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is a richly complicated and, to some, a deeply;disturbing work.

The sublime in literature is described as the sense of awe that is evoked in the presence of great power and grandeur in nature or in art. In this engaging new volume, the role of the sublime is discussed in ""Emma"", ""Ode to the West Wind"", ""Song of Myself"", and many other works. Featuring original essays and excerpts from previously published critical analyses, each book in the new Bloom's ""Literary Themes"" series gives students valuable insight into the title's subject theme.

First published in 1832, Shakespeare’s Heroines is a unique hybrid of Shakespeare criticism, women’s rights activism, and conduct literature. Jameson’s collection of readings of female characters includes praise for unexpected role models as varied as Portia, Cleopatra, and Lady Macbeth; her interpretations of these and other characters portray intellect, passion, political ambition, and eroticism as acceptable aspects of women’s behaviour. This inventive work of literary criticism addresses the problems of women’s education and participation in public life while also providing insightful, original, and entertaining readings of Shakespeare’s women. This Broadview Edition includes a critical introduction that places Shakespeare’s Heroines in the context of Jameson’s literary career and political life. Appendices include personal correspondence and other literary and political writings by Jameson, examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, and selections from Victorian conduct books.

The sublime - that elusive encounter with overwhelming height, power or limits - has been associated with music from the early-modern rise of interest in the Longinian sublime to its saturation of European culture in the later nineteenth century and beyond. This volume offers a historically situated study of the relationship between music, sound and the sublime. Together, the authors distinguish between the different aesthetics of production, representation and effect, while understanding these as often mutually reinforcing approaches. They demonstrate music's strength in playing out the sublime as transfer, transport and transmission of power, allied to the persistent theme of destruction, deaths and endings. The volume opens up two avenues for further research suggested by the adjective 'sonorous': a wider spectrum of sounds heard as sublime, and (especially for those outside musicology) a more multifaceted idea of music as a cultural practice that shares boundaries with other sounding phenomena.