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.

Arjan Plaisier believes audiences who view Shakespeare performances and readers who study the plays deserve better than some of the recent interpretations of the Bard's work. In their attempt to be "modern," these interpreters commit historical amnesia by slighting the Christian ethos of the early Renaissance period in which Shakespeare wrote and by riding roughshod over the religious underpinnings of his plays. This neglect skews the playwright's intentions, confuses the audience, and diminishes the full effect of the play. Plaisier, too, is modern--and in a more profound sense. He sets forth how Shakespeare shapes his plots to conform at an ultimate level to timeless biblical narrative patterns (like Northrop Frye, he regards the Bible as a "code book"), so that there is a "right" ending to the work. And in an Appendix, Plaisier provides some kindly advice to his fellow pastors. You do well, he says to them, to enrich your noble calling with attention to literature. To do this, he says, you will find Shakespeare most helpful. Yes, and Plaisier's perceptive essays point to the deep wisdom in Shakespeare by which we can all live.

Explores Shakespeare's plays in their most immediate context: the hundreds of plays known to original audiences, but lost to us.

THE SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA MCQ (MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS) SERVES AS A VALUABLE RESOURCE FOR INDIVIDUALS AIMING TO DEEPEN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF VARIOUS COMPETITIVE EXAMS, CLASS TESTS, QUIZ COMPETITIONS, AND SIMILAR ASSESSMENTS. WITH ITS EXTENSIVE COLLECTION OF MCQS, THIS BOOK EMPOWERS YOU TO ASSESS YOUR GRASP OF THE SUBJECT MATTER AND YOUR PROFICIENCY LEVEL. BY ENGAGING WITH THESE MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS, YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE SUBJECT, IDENTIFY AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT, AND LAY A SOLID FOUNDATION. DIVE INTO THE SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA MCQ TO EXPAND YOUR SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA KNOWLEDGE AND EXCEL IN QUIZ COMPETITIONS, ACADEMIC STUDIES, OR PROFESSIONAL ENDEAVORS. THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS ARE PROVIDED AT THE END OF EACH PAGE, MAKING IT EASY FOR PARTICIPANTS TO VERIFY THEIR ANSWERS AND PREPARE EFFECTIVELY.

Shakespeare's authorship of his plays can no longer be in doubt with this book's clear identification of autobiographical passages throughout his work from his legal documents in Stratford and London courts. Shakespeare refers to the loss of his inheritance, by his father mortgaging it to his uncle, from early works such as Taming of the Shrew to the late Lear. His mother is referred to in As You Like It and Coriolanus; his twins in Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night; and the loss of his son from Merchant of Venice to Macbeth. His daughters, as recipients of his accumulated wealth, are subjects of his concern from Lear to The Tempest. More important, the knowledge of the law in his personal pursuits is revealed as a source for the legal content in his works, which found fit audiences among jurists at the Inns of Court law schools and in King James' Court. Shakespeare pleased the king on these matters enough to have him command his plays to be repeated on an occasion. For himself, Shakespeare learned from his own writing how to deal with the language of law theoretically and conceptually with such concepts as equity and mercy in Chancery. He used his own family life, personal documents, and legal problems to give impetus to his version of borrowed characters, plots, plays, and history. These personal events, from the placement of the references, give his plays, which sometimes end with a fictionalized, wish-fulfillment, or literary compensation, an autobiographical initial compulsion.