Shakespeare’s enduring vitality accounts for a multilayered popularity, a singularity that makes of the Bard an extraordinary literary case. Taken as a cultural phenomenon and as a matter of inquiry rather than as an awe-inspiring achievement, the difference of Shakespeare is here interrogated from multiple angles with a view to retrieving both Shakespeare’s historicity and Shakespeare’s uniqueness. The essays included in the volume, whether they provide insights into the linguistic fabric of Shakespeare’s corpus or delve into the rhetorical texture of individual plays (Hamlet, The Tempest, Henry V), set out to unravel the clues for Shakespeare’s outstanding future adaptability. Steeped in the discursive arena of Renaissance culture, Shakespeare’s plays are also seen as capable of testing, challenging, and problematizing at once received concepts of space and time, the philosophical tenets of personality theory, and the early modern foundations of the art of memory. Hence a mystifying gaze, the ground of a difference which calls for investigation while defying cultural reductionism. As they lay emphasis on the intricacies between cultural history and individual craftsmanship, and come to terms with the irreducible complexity of rhetorical strategies, these essays highlight the semiotic productiveness of Shakespeare’s plays, and call for a reappraisal of the Bard’s cultural potential well beyond the precincts of academia.
|
CART
SERIES
JOURNAL