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Author:

Lerer, Seth, 1955- author.

Title:

Shakespeare's lyric stage : myth, music, and poetry in the last plays / Seth Lerer.

Publisher:

The University of Chicago Press,

Copyright Date:

2018

Description:

xxii, 253 pages ; 23 cm

Subject:

Shakespeare, William,--1564-1616--Technique.
Shakespeare, William,--1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation.
English drama--17th century--History and criticism.
Dramatic monologues--History--17th century.
Music and literature--England--History--17th century.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents:

Myth, music, and lyric -- An elegy for Ariel -- Poetry and performance in the Winter's Tale -- Pageantry, power, and lyricism in Henry VIII -- Aesthetic judgment and the audience in Cymbeline -- Epilogue: lyric recognition and the editorial romance in Pericles and the Two Noble Kinsmen.

Summary:

What does it mean to have an emotional response to poetry and music? And, just as important but considered less often, what does it mean not to have such a response? What happens when lyric utterances - which should invite consolation, revelation, and connection - somehow fall short of the listener's expectations? As Seth Lerer shows in this pioneering book, Shakespeare's late plays invite us to contemplate that very question, offering up lyric as a displaced and sometimes desperate antidote to situations of duress or powerlessness. Lerer argues that the theme of lyric misalignment running throughout The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, and Cymbeline serves a political purpose, a last-ditch effort at transformation for characters and audiences who had lived through witch-hunting, plague, regime change, political conspiracies, and public executions. A deep dive into the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book also explores what Shakespearean lyric is able to recuperate for these "victims of history" by virtue of its disjointed utterances. To this end, Lerer establishes the concept of mythic lyricism: an estranging use of songs and poetry that functions to recreate the past as present, to empower the mythic dead, and to restore a bit of magic to the commonplaces and commodities of Jacobean England. Reading against the devotion to form and prosody common in Shakespeare scholarship, Lerer's account of lyric utterance's vexed role in his late works offers new ways to understand generational distance and cultural change throughout the playwright's oeuvre.

ISBN:

022658240X
9780226582405
022658254X
9780226582542

OCLC:

(OCoLC)1022978432

LCCN:

2018003418

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)